Trend Report: Rural Sociology

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1980 28: 3Current SociologyHoward Newby

Trend Report: Rural Sociology

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Trend Report:RURAL SOCIOLOGY

Howard Newby

I

INTRODUCTION

’Many of us’ declared James Copp in his presidential address to theRural Sociological Society in 1972, ’think that we know what ruralsociology is, but I am not sure that we do’ (71, p. 515). This remarkcan be taken as symptomatic of the loss of confidence that ruralsociology has suffered during the 1970s, a loss of confidence thathas been most pronounced in the country where it originated as aninstitutionalized sub-discipline - the United States. Copp was par-ticularly harsh in his judgement:

In my opinion, we know less about contemporary rural society in 1972 than weknew about the contemporary rural society in the 1940s...If most of the

research which rural sociologists were doing in 1969 and 1970 were to havesomehow disappeared, the world would have noticed little loss...As a result ofmy survey, I came to the conclusion that rural sociologists really were not themasters of the phenomena of rural society. We toyed with it, but I did not

perceive a great depth of understanding. The world was changing faster than thediscipline was growing in its knowledge of the phenomena occurring in ruralareas. (71, pp. 516, 521)

Copp was not, however, alone in his verdict. Two years later, W.Keith Warner returned to this theme:

... rural sociology needs perhaps most of all a great deal more codification andparadigm formation. We already now have much good research and an abun-dance of information, but lack a good deal in knowing what it all means. (358,p. 315)

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And at the 1977 RSS conference Sheldon Lowry offered a similarlygloomy prognosis:

... I have the uneasy feeling that the Rural Sociological Society is undergoing a,sleeping crisis’. There is at least preliminary evidence that there is a cancerousgrowth silently developing throughout our system that, if left undetected and un-checked, will eventually sap our strength, divert our energies, and stifle ourgrowth. (320)

Nor is Lowry merely indulging in a rhetorical flourish, as the re-mainder of his presidential address makes clear, for he identifiesproblems of subject matter, theoretical relevance, public accoun-tability and even research competence. These do indeed seem to be’hard times’ (160, 267) for rural sociology.The comments of these three leading practitioners of rural

sociology are in marked contrast to the confidence which suffusesT. Lynn Smith’s trend report on the last occasion when CurrentSociology was concerned with the topic. In 1957 Smith was able tolook back over nearly fifty years of apparently continuous advanceand his vision of the future was a confident one (325; for a fullerversion see 327). Yet by 1977 Lowry was presenting a portrayal ofalmost endemic crisis in the subject, with ’the crisis of the 1950sand 1960s’ set alongside ’rural sociology at the crossroads’ in the1970s (320, p. 461). Although the term ’crisis’ is much over-used insociology, in this instance it may not be inappropriate; certainly asimilar malaise has been recognised by European writers (e.g. 27,125, 296). For this reason this essay will attempt to analyze theorigins of rural sociology’s crisis, rather than offer a completelycomprehensive review of the field, an analysis which, it is hoped,will above all be useful in pointing a way forward. This will involveinvestigating rural sociology both in terms of a history of ideas anda sociology of ’rural sociological’ knowledge. While this offersthe advantage of looking at rural sociology as both a discipline andas an institution, the major disadvantage is that it limits the scopeof the discussion and considerably circumscribes the range ofmaterial that can be considered. Fortunately the need for a totallycomprehensive literature review is reduced by the recent publica-tion of a number of annotated bibliographies (e.g. 29, 60, 131). Amuch more urgent task consists of assessing the current status ofrural sociology in view of the widespread perception that ’the basicinsufficiency of the sociological concepts with which rural



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phenomena have been apprehended has finally caught up with theirusers’ (125, p. 254).

Definitional Problems

For reasons of convenience as much as clarity it is necessary at theoutset to define the field of rural sociology and thereby the scope ofthis essay. In part this is merely a matter of expediency since somehighly arbitrary boundary must of necessity be placed on ’ruralsociology’ for the purposes of managing the material upon whichthis report is based; in part, however, the definitional problemswhich have arisen in rural sociology are symptomatic of a moreprofound conceptual difficulty which requires a more consideredanalysis. This duality is, of course, reflected in the work of mostrural sociologists: there is a general awareness of the fact that whatconstitutes rural sociology and separates it off from other topicareas is almost wholly a matter of convenience, but at the sametime there has been some confusion over whether a sociologicallymeaningful definition of ’rural’ is either possible or desirable.The first part of this problem can be approached by defining

what ’rural sociology’ is in terms of what self-proclaimed ’ruralsociologists’ do. Although Copp (71, p. 515) rightly terms thisdefinition ’facile’ it does point to one very important aspect ofrural sociology: its institutional structure. Rural sociology, in thisarbitrary - and in many ways mischievous - sense is separatedfrom two other subject areas which are equally rural and equallysociological - the sociology of development and peasant studies.In terms of textbooks, journals, research activity and even

teaching, rural sociology has been, for the most part, institutionallyseparated from them. As will be argued more fully later in thisessay, this separation has tended to deny rural sociology both ahistorical perspective and a holistic approach to rural society fromwhich it would otherwise benefit. However, at the considerable riskof perpetuating this unfortunate division, the areas of developmentand peasant studies will be left to other editions of Current

Sociology to deal with. In terms of how it institutionally definesitself, therefore, rural sociology is the rural sociology of advancedindustrial societies. Some such societies - for example, France orItaly - do, of course, include a sizeable peasant sector, whichmeans that certain issues related to peasant studies and the



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sociology of development cannot be ignored entirely. However, it isin this sense that rural sociology will be defined here.The institutionalization of rural sociology also lends itself to a

second kind of definition. Rural sociology consists not only of asubject matter but of a particular style of research. At times thisresearch style (to be documented fully in the following section) hasappeared to approach the status of a weltanschauung or paradigmin the Kuhnian sense (197) and although this underestimates theconsiderable amount of debate on theoretical and methodologicalissues which have characterized rural sociology in the United Statessince the Second World War, this research style has often beenpresented to the outside world in precisely these terms. In this

(highly specific) sense it is therefore possible to accept Nelson’s ver-dict that: ’As an accepted college and university discipline, ruralsociology is indigenous to the United States.’ (254, p. 410) It was’invented’ there in the Land Grant Colleges and enjoyed a separate,if somewhat uneasy, existence from ’general’ sociology whichenabled it to develop its own research style. Since the Second WorldWar it has spread out from the United States to other parts of theworld, retaining its own research style and leading to a similarlyseparate institutional development to the ’rural sociology’ alreadyin existence there. Only by defining rural sociology in terms of thisresearch style is Hofstee, for example, able to set aside the longEuropean tradition of rural sociological research and argue that’...the influence of modern American sociology in general, andmodern American rural sociology in particular, was of primary im-portance for the development of rural sociology in Europe.’ (171,p. 338) He refers to ’this mental Marshall aid’ (171, p. 341) whichstimulated European rural sociology in the 1950s and led to thespread of this research style via journals like Sociologia Ruralis,Les Cahiers Ruraux, Etudes Rurales, Zeitschrift fiirAgrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie and Quaderni di SociologiaRuralis (171, p. 338; c.f. 205, p. 580). More recently the influenceof American rural sociology has spread further still: to LatinAmerica (281, 331) to Asia (36) and even to Eastern Europe (350).This diffusion has also become consolidated by the formation ofregional societies in North America, Europe, Latin America andAsia, partly promoted by the United Nations Food and

Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Thus while there has been muchtalk of ’crisis’ in the United States, the influence of this researchstyle has, paradoxically, spread further and faster than ever before.



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The label which is customarily applied to this research style is’scientific’. For example:

The scientific study of rural society as a specialised area of sociology is a

development of the twentieth century and prior to World War II had its growthprincipally in the United States. Since 1950 such study has developed institu-tional support in many countries. (205, p. 580)

Like all sciences, rural sociology developed in response to a need. It is an elemen-tary fact in the realm of scientific thought that a new science comes into existencewhenever phenomena confronting the human mind are not, or cannot be,understood satisfactorily by the existing disciplines or sciences. So it was withrural sociology. (170, p. 1).

The characteristics of this ’scientific’ research style are: positivist,inductive, quantitative and ’applied’. Although thesecharacteristics will be examined in more detail below, it is impor-tant to understand that they define the field of rural sociology noless than its subject matter. Thus Taylor in a typical ethnocentricstatement about ’The Development of Rural Sociology Abroad’(342) concurs with the judgement of the Director-General of FAOthat in 1945 there were ’no rural sociologists anywhere in the worldexcept in the United States’. Taylor shows how rural sociology wasthen spread throughout the world with an almost missionary zealby American rural sociologists and their American-trained

graduate students. The elision of research style with substantivecontribution is well captured in Taylor’s comment that

I suppose it can be said that European rural sociology is now coming of age, butit has not yet carried out much rural research of the type which has establishedrural sociology on a widespread basis in the United States. (342, pp. 471-2)

Hence rural sociology is only recognized as such if it corresponds tothe correct research style: the style in itself defines the substance.Although one of the purposes of this essay is to demolish this glibassumption, it must necessarily provide a starting-point for theanalysis.

It must be acknowledged, however, that the circumscription ofrural sociology to advanced industrial societies and to a particularresearch style is ultimately one of expediency and is purely con-tingent upon the aims of this report. In other words ’rural

sociology’ (and the disinfecting inverted commas are intended to in-



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dicate the provisional and arbitrary nature of this label) is in thefirst instance defined in terms of the primary activities of its practi-tioners. But this immediately raises a more fundamental conceptualproblem which cannot be dealt with so arbitrarily. As Copp haspointed out:

There is no rural society and there is no rural economy. It is merely our analyticdistinction, our rhetorical device. Unfortunately we end to be the victims of ourown terminological duplicity. We tend to ignore the import of what happens inthe total economy and society as it affects the rural sector. We tend to think ofthe rural sector as a separate entity which can be developed while the non-ruralsector is held constant. Our thinking is ensnared by our own words. (71, p. 519)

The history of rural sociology has indeed been dogged by this pro-blem. As we shall see there has been an ultimately futile search for asociological definition of ’rural’, a reluctance to recognize that theterm ’rural’ is an empirical category rather than a sociological one,that it is merely a ’geographical expression’. As such it can be usedas a convenient short-hand label, but in itself it has no sociologicalmeaning. Wakeley makes this point in a succinct discussion of

definitional problems in rural sociology:

... rural sociology is plagued by its qualifying adjective. ’Rural’ is essentially afolk term used to describe some special field of endeavour or special emphasis, asindicated in each case by those using the term. The folk term ’rural’ cannot becombined properly with the scientific term ‘sociology’. If an acceptable scientificconceptualisation for ’rural’ cannot be developed, we have remaining onlysociology, however and wherever it is practiced, whether in urban or non-urbanmilieu. Lacking a sociological conceptualisation, ’rural’ can still be used mean-ingfully but not scientifically...

Clearly, the future of rural sociology depends to a degree upon how we choose todefine rural, either in relation to sociology, or more scientifically as a

sociologically conceptualised subsystem or subdiscipline of sociology, or moresimply as a practical choice of empirical referent or jield for study which can beexplicated by sociology as a scientific discipline. (353, pp. 195, 197)

Thus although the most common definition of rural sociology is’the scientific study of rural society’, this merely begs the mostcrucial question - whether ’rural society’ can be sociologicallydefined. The result, as Kaufman (186) has pointed out, has beensuperficiality and lack of focus in the field. The contention of thispaper is that since no sociological definition of rural is acceptable(a claim which will be substantiated below) then it is only what



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Wakeley calls an ’empirical referent’. Rural sociology is thereforebest defined as the sociology of geographical localities where thesize and density of the population is relatively small (c.f. 358,p. 306).Two consequences follow from this. First, there can be no theory

of rural society without a theory of society tout court. Althoughthis has often been recognized by rural sociologists they have tend-ed to pay only lip service to the fact that rural society can only bestudied as part of the larger society. Instead rural sociology hasbeen characterized by its atheoretical, even anti-theoretical, nature(a common observation) or has attempted to develop a specificallyrural sociological theory inductively without reference to ’general’sociological theories. In some respects, however, this theoreticalreticence is understandable. Rural sociology has been very badlyserved by the classical writers in the history of sociological thoughtwho, in their endeavour to create theories of urban-industrial socie-ty have all too often misunderstood or even ignored the nature ofrural society. The rural has frequently been regarded as residualand therefore given very little attention in general sociologicaltheory, a lack of interest from which rural sociology has un-doubtedly suffered. The second consequence of the definition ofrural sociology given above is closely connected with this. It is not

only apparent that rural sociology cannot operate without an ac-ceptable theory of society, but that it also requires a theory of thespatial allocation of the population (since ’rural’ is a spatial,geographical category) which is also sociologically relevant. In otherwords, rural sociology demands a theory which links the spatialwith the social. Moreover, in order to be a sociological theory, thesocial must be given primacy. This requirement has only been in-frequently perceived by rural sociologists who have, if anything,preferred to emphasise the spatial at the expense of the social

(through such notions as the ’rural-urban continuum’). At the pre-sent time, however, such a theory is conspicuous by its absence inrural sociology, although there are, perhaps, some interestinglessons to be learned from urban sociology which is afflicted by thesame theoretical problem viewed from the obverse side.

This brief discussion of definitional problems is best regarded asa preamble to the two following sections, which will elaborate theseremarks in much more detail. Since the theoretical inadequacies ofrural sociology cannot be understood without an appreciation ofthe institutional structure from which they have emerged, this



10

paper will take the slightly unorthodox form of postponing adiscussion of theory in rural sociology until after a consideration ofits research style. This will also involve a brief history of ruralsociology in the United States - a not altogether inappropriateway of offering an overview of the field.

2

THE RISE OF RURAL SOCIOLOGY:FROM PURNELL TO PATH ANALYSIS

The history of rural sociology in the United States has beendocumented by several writers (e.g. 29, 44, 94, 170, 254, 255, 325).There is a general agreement that rural sociology emerged as adiscipline out of the ’farm crisis’ in the United States which follow-ed the Civil War and which drew increasing public attentiontowards the end of the nineteenth century. It was during this periodthat farmers’ organizations like the Grange and, later, the Farmers’Alliance began to seek federal aid in solving the economic problemsof rural areas, which were afflicted by severe depression by the endof the century. As Nelson (254, pp. 413-5) notes, early Americansociologists like Giddings, Sumner and what was later to be

recognized as the Chicago School, were either uninterested in theseproblems or unsympathetic towards them. Rural sociologytherefore developed separately from the field of general sociology.Not only did its early exponents receive little formal sociologicaltraining, but their efforts were to be organized and funded withinan entirely separate institutional framework.

Within academic circles the ’farm problem’ was taken up byagricultural economists (see 343), with whom over the years ruralsociologists were to become more closely allied than with

sociologists researching into other areas. In addition, however, thedepressed conditions of the rural population received the sym-pathetic concern of clergymen, novelists, journalists and teachers.Smith (325, p. 8) credits the activities of the clergymen in particularwith the foundation of courses in rural social problems at theUniversities of Chicago, Michigan and North Dakota by the turn ofthe century. In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt crowned theirefforts by announcing his appointment of a Commission on Coun-try Life which was, according to Smith, ’responsible in large



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measure for the development of rural sociological research andteaching in the United States’ (325, p. 8; see also 254). The report,writes Smith,

sounded a call for better living on the farms and recommended three measuresfor promoting the desired objective:(a) ’taking stock of country life... an exhaustive study or survey of all the condi-tions that surround the business of farming and the people who live in the coun-try’ ; ,(b) nationalised extension work; and(c) ’a campaign for rural progress. We urge the holding of local, state and evennational conferences on rural progress, designed to unite the interests of educa-tion, organisation and religion into one forward movement for the rebuilding ofcountry life’. (325, p. 9)

The Commission not only provided an enormous stimulus for ruralsociological research. It also determined the form which thisresearch took: extensive fact-gathering about the rural population,a strongly ’applied’ emphasis, an unshakeable belief in the virtuesof rural life and a close identification with the values and mores ofrural inhabitants.The church was in the forefront of the research activity which

duly followed the publication of the Commission’s report. Between1912 and 1916 the Presbyterian Church conducted sixteen ’Churchand Community Surveys’ covering seventeen counties in twelve dif-ferent states under the direction of Warren H. Wilson (44, pp. 7-8),and later a grandiose scheme was devised by the Interworld ChurchMovement to undertake a survey of the church and rural life in

every state of the Union. This activity was prompted by worriesabout the declining influence of the church in rural areas, a factorwhich was seen to go hand in hand with the decline of the ’rural

community’. Summarizing this period Hoffer observed that:

Interest in rural life tended to focus on the community because its importance inthe social well-being of rural people was readily recognised by persons who wereinterested in rural life. Most of these surveys were presentations of facts andfigures about different aspects of community life. It was apparently assumedthat the discovery of facts about community life would be sufficient evidenceand justification for programmes of improvement or amelioration. (170, p. 7)

Such a book-keeping approach to pastoral concern was epitomizedby the work of Charles Galpin, a former clergyman, who moved tothe University of Wisconsin in 1911 and produced his classic study,



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The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community in 1915.

Galpin developed the community study as a method of in-

vestigating the structural features of the trade areas of small ruraltowns which, for him, constituted the ’human community’ withinwhich the rural inhabitant could be located and integrated.Galpin’s work influenced a generation of rural sociologists. In

1919 he was appointed as director of the newly-created Division ofFarm Population and Rural Life Studies in the Bureau of

Agricultural Economics of the United States Department of

Agriculture (USDA). From this position he was able to stimulateresearch on rural communities throughout the country by offeringcomparatively small amounts of funding. In the early 1920s a floodof usually highly descriptive rural community studies were publish-ed which owed their appearance directly to Galpin’s influence. Inthis way Galpin also instituted the strong links between rural

sociology and USDA (in its various manifestations) which was alsoto mould the research effort of the discipline.

Parallel to this research activity, rural sociology was also findingits way into college and university curricula. The first textbook wasJohn Gillette’s Constructive Rural Sociology, published in 1913,followed shortly afterwards by Paul Vogt’s Introduction to RuralSociology in 1917. Since the research on which to base these textshad barely been completed, it was hardly surprising that theyshould rely upon the problems raised in the Country Life Commis-sion report. The emphasis was on description and improvement;Gillette’s book, for example, included chapters on such matters assanitation, health care and even charity. They were books on ruralsocial problems rather than rural sociology as such, but in definingrural sociology as the description and amelioration of rural socialproblems they were to inaugurate a pattern of teaching andresearch in the subject which was to continue for over fifty years.As Schmitt (311, p. 180ff) has indicated, the academic study ofrural life in this early period was never entirely immune to thepredominantly Romantic, even Arcadian, outlook on rural life tobe found in American society generally. Rural society itself wasrarely seen as problematic; the problem was rather how to preserveits wholesome qualities against enfeeblement by alien social forces,to avert the disintegration of rural communities and the decline ofthe ’traditional rural way of life’ and, not least, to preserve the ex-istence of a separate rural identity.

This concern to retain the Jeffersonian values of community and



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grass-roots democracy led to the active state sponsorship of ruralsociology as a means of servicing the rural population in the reten-tion of what were believed to be distinctively rural values and waysof life. In other words rural sociology became part of an explicitsocial policy aimed at preserving, as far as was possible, the ap-parently jeopardized virtues of rural America. Galpin was quite ex-plicit about his commitment, fearing that the transition from ruralto urban life would de-humanize the population and leave it out oftouch with nature. It would give rise to a society ’immuned in brickand stone, gaining its outlook, as it were, through periscopes’ (127,p. 11). However, such an ambitious programme of research andeducation could not be achieved without federal funding and this iswhy the Purnell Act of 1925 is rightly described by Smith (325,p. 11) as ’a measure of paramount importance in the history ofrural sociological research’. This Act enabled the colleges of

agriculture and agricultural experiment stations set up under theMorrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887 - the so-calledLand Grant institutions (see 37) - to support rural sociologicalresearch. Each state received 50,000 dollars annually for researchpurposes, making it possible for the agricultural experiment sta-tions to fund rural sociological research within their respectivestate boundaries.The Purnell Act therefore provided the stimulus for rural

sociology to be established as a recognized discipline within theLand Grant institutions. Not surprisingly there followed an enor-mous expansion in research output, although this was very muchshaped by its institutional context. For example, rural sociologistswere placed under heavy pressure to demonstrate that their workwas ’useful’ (170, p. 7), especially during the Depression years.This merely consolidated the ’applied’ character of the discipline,while the strong institutional links with agricultural economists alsoreinforced the quest for ’scientific’ legitimacy. Rural sociologytherefore passed from an expression of concern by rural clergymento a field of systematic inductive enquiry, from ’evangelism’ to’positivism’ (252). The emphasis on the tabulation of rural socialchange remained, however, and the title of Brunner and Kolb’sRural Social Trends (1933) - a restudy of 140 agricultural villages- typifies the kind of research which resulted. In 1934 DwightSanderson, Co-Ordinator of Rural Research under Roosevelt’s NewDeal programme of rural development, pleaded for rural sociologists’to provide facts, facts for the policy-maker and programme ad-



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ministrator’ (204, p. 458). Sanderson promoted ’literally hundreds’of such studies (325, p. 13) between 1933 and 1936 - mostlysurveys of relief needs and the socio-economic characteristics of

recipients of relief. By the end of the 1930s a definite research stylehad become firmly established in rural sociology, aided by a furtherspate of textbooks and works of synthesis (e.g. 192, 201, 387). It

marked a ’period of maturation’ (325) or a ’coming of age’ (94) ex-emplified by the establishment of the journal, Rural Sociology, in1936 and a Rural Sociological Society, divorced from the AmericanSociological Society in December 1937. Although there was a

widespread recognition that much work needed to be done ruralsociology seemed to be set on a path of progress, which could betaken up again after the Second World War.The hiatus in rural sociological research necessarily introduced

by the war effort seemed to provoke a period of reflection,however. In the immediate post-war years a number of papers ap-peared which discussed the contemporary state of rural sociology,some in more pessimistic terms than others (e.g. 3, 43, 253, 368). Atits annual meeting in 1948 the RSS passed a resolution empoweringits Executive Committee to set up a committee ’to appraise thewhole field of rural sociology... and make recommendations forits more orderly and systematic development’. The initialdeliberations of this committee led to the production of Sewell’smuch-cited paper on ’Needed Research in Rural Sociology’ (316).In fhis paper Sewell notes the emergence of a division of opinionwhich has widened ever since:

... finally it was agreed that the major task before the committee was the ex-amination of the field to determine needed areas of research and to outline insome detail the basic research to be undertaken, indicating its theoreticalconnections and its methodological requisites...

Here arose the most serious disagreement in the committee’s delibera-

tions... This dispute was over the interpretation of the term ’needed research’.The question... is perhaps most sharply drawn in rural sociology and hinges onwhether the term ’needed’ is to be taken as meaning needed in the sense that thesociety in which we live needs and demands the research for the resolution ofsome of its more pressing problems or whether it means needed in the sense ofbeing necessary to an adequate body of scientific knowledge concerning thephenomena of the field. (316, p. 116)

To Sewell’s undisguised dismay, the former view prevailed and hispaper consists largely of a vigorous critique of that approach.



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Sewell’s criticisms are directed towards

the pervasive aversion of rural sociology generally to theoretical work coupledwith its traditional insistence on keeping everything on the ’practical’ level. Thisis further borne out by insistence on a definition of needed research in terms ofwhat agricultural leaders, administrators and congressmen think rural sociologyshould be doing, by the domination ... of the problems emphasis [and] by thefailure... to agree to a tentative systematic scheme for the evaluation of thefield... (316, p. 121)

Sewell’s allegation of an ’aversion to theory’ in rural sociology hassince become a common observation (see the following section ofthis paper) but he was also concerned to elaborate on the dangersfor the discipline as a whole which resided in the ’exclusively prac-tical emphasis’ which he believed that it had developed. ThusSewell warned that

... our preoccupation with the immediately practical has forced us to fit into

large economic, educational and political programmes in minor administrativeor advisory roles where there was a little or no opportunity to do any researchwhich would test our knowledge beyond the common-sense level, much lessallow us to test crucial hypotheses under circumstances approximating condi-tions of control. (316, pp. 121-2)

Under these conditions, Sewell argued, rural sociologists wouldnever be anything but ’handmaidens to professional educators,economists, agricultural programme administrators and social ac-tionists of all kinds’. These comments were echoed shortly after-wards in two papers which emerged from the deliberations of theResearch Committee of the RSS (148, 341). The most prominentshortcomings of rural sociology were listed as:

1. An apparent lack of theoretical orientation in the development of theresearch problem.

2. Lack of concern with the adequacy of sampling procedures.3. Inadequacy of measurement instruments.4. Inadequate concern for, or reporting of, field or testing conditions.5. Lack of control of other possible explanatory variables.6. Lack of concern for orienting findings to a general theory. (341, p. 117)

Elsewhere Gross (148, p. 84) noted that many of the research pro-jects in rural sociology were ’at best indirectly related to the

discipline of sociology’. In part Gross identified this ad hoc



16

problem-solving role with the pressure exerted upon rural

sociologists by ’agricultural leaders and administrators’, while Slet-to, in his discussion of Sewell’s paper pointed to the central dilem-ma confronting American rural sociologists in the immediate post-war era:

The rural sociologists’ dilemma is that he is called upon to function as a scientistin doing research into practical problems of rural welfare, but is allowed too lit-tle opportunity to do the research needed to provide him with the basic

knowledge essential to scientific proficiency. What rural sociologists seem toneed most is not more money for research but the drafting of an effective planfor gaining more freedom to do significant research within their present socialsettings. (Sletto in 316, p. 128)

Viewed from this perspective the trend in rural sociologicalresearch in the United States during the 1950s was not very en-couraging. Smith, in his report for Current Sociology in 1957 com-mented upon the major shift in research support which had occur-red :

During the formative years, and in those of rapid growth and development aswell, the research at the agricultural experiment stations and the courses at theagricultural colleges had by no means a monopoly in the field. In the decade thathas just closed, however, it has been very different. The bulletins, circulars,memoirs and other publications issued by the agricultural experiment stationsconstitute the great bulk of rural sociological literature ... Even the research ac-tivities of various federal agencies withered on the vine following 1945, sothat...with the federal agencies largely out of the rural sociological research pic-ture, the concentration of activities at the agricultural experiment stations is evenmore marked. (325, pp. 16-17)

This tight grip on research funding and the peculiar institutionalstructure of rural sociology probably accounts for the majorparadox in the post-war history of the discipline. On the one hand,Sewell’s criticisms have been constantly repeated by a wide range ofobservers - fifteen years later he was able to list as many as

twenty-one reflexive papers (see 317, pp. 428-9, fn. 3) - so thatrural sociologists, individually, can hardly have been unaware ofthese issues. Yet the nature of the research output has scarcelychanged in terms of its overall style and scope, methodological im-provements and minor shifts in emphasis notwithstanding (see 317,334). Offering a detailed consideration of each of these critiques is,perhaps, a needlessly masochistic exercise, but a few examples willsuffice to give some idea of the consistency of the comments:



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As measured by formally allocated research time and personnel, rural

sociologists have enjoyed a distinctively favourable position. Unfortunately, thissupport has entailed administrative and cultural restrictions that have hamperedprofessional development of the field. Scholarly output has not improved inquality or in adaptation to the changing society commensurate with this institu-tionalised recognition. Indeed, the interests of rural sociologists have changedlittle during the past century, a century that has seen major reorientations inother areas of sociology...In recent years, these contributions [to sociologicaltheory] have diminished, and much of the work merits the impatient judgementit receives: ’fact-finding’. (3, pp. 360, 362)

The rural sociologist... operates so completely within a closed system that he isunable to experience the rural community from a point of view other than onethat is ideologically compatible with members of the community he studies. Thepolitical and bureaucratic restrictions ... and the built-in rural bias of the resear-cher serve as the basic limiting factors in his community research. The standar-disation of data collection and analysis is a part of the ritualisation that

characterises the bureaucratised research process and serves as a means of

avoiding inconvenient factual information that would more likely flow fromunstructured field research. So, too, the focus of objectivity and factuality allowthe researcher to make his study without having to confront data contradictoryto the rural ethic. The inability of the researcher to go beyond the community’sself-definitions in his analysis of communal life suggests his desire to avoid see-ing himself as an agent of disenchantment in the community. In so doing, hefails to recognise that one cannot necessarily be objective by quantifying the sub-jective feelings of others ... The rural sociologist, in his research, fails to makethis transition from the inside to the outside view and thus never gets beyond theclichéd and subjective experiences of the people he is studying. (271,pp. 349-350)

Two years ago, I had the privilege of reviewing the research programmes of mostof the major land-grant universities doing work in rural sociology. I was impress-ed by much of what I saw, but I was disappointed too. I was disappointed bywhat seemed to me to be the ploughing of old ground, the pursuit of the same oldproblems, the failure to undertake research that was relevant to the major pro-blems emerging in our society...

I was mystified by the process of problem selection...1 I could not repress thehypothesis that the major criterion in the selection of research problems by ruralsociologists was the availability of funds. Maybe this is the way the world works.Thus far, I have failed to refute my hypothesis...

We are facile at turning anything into a research problem and designing asurvey... We approach problems in terms of individual adjustment rather thanstructural constraints. Similarly, our client agencies are happier to see ourresearch move in this way. We may be fair social psychologists, but we are notvery good as macro-sociologists. People are real; social structures, systems, andideologies are ephemeral. Everything about our rural background and empiricaltraining sensitises us to the concrete. (71, pp. 520-1, 523)



18

Meanwhile I am setting off to Saskatchewan with a small group of colleagues toset up a special discussion group on the ’Prospects for Radical Rural Sociology’.I have no great hopes. One of the delegates has already told me that the idea offun up there is to sit around and count the number of times the wheat sways in

the wind. (344)

Taylor’s latter comment, though purposely facetious, summarizesthe widely-held view of non-rural sociologists on the preoccupationwith shallow empiricism - the endless descriptions of rural

organisations, the interminable studies of diffusion of innovationsand the ultimately meaningless ’tabulations’ of rural-urban dif-ferences.When Sewell returned to survey the field again in 1965 he

coincluded that ’rural sociological research has come a long way inthe past thirty years’ (317, p. 451), particularly in terms of

technical competence and presentation. But the old problems re-mained :

One quite definite impression is that rural sociology! research tends to be

decidedly parochial not only in its focus on local people and problems, but alsoin its intellectual orientations...Attention to local populations and local situa-tions tends to restrict the sociological imagination and the inventiveness of therural sociologist and to prompt him to give undue attention to problems and fin-dings which may have local significance but may be trivial in the larger context.(317, pp. 446, 447) .

Similarly Stokes and Miller in their methodological review ten yearslater noted a further advance in data-collection and data-analysistechniques, but as they rightly point out, the increased use of moresophisticated and powerful statistical tools does not always meanan improvement in the knowledge produced (334, p. 432). In thisarea they note that

The major areas of interest to rural sociologists have remained fairly stable overthe past two decades. Studies in the areas of social organisation and socialpsychology continue to dominate the field. (334, p. 431)

Thus, while the increasing use of path analysis and other multi-variate techniques has undoubtedly brought a much-needed vigourinto rural sociological research, displacing the much more impres-sionistic and loosely-organized research of the pre-war era, whatHaller has called ’the practicality, parochial cost, the arid contem-poraneity and the specificity of most American rural sociological



19

writings’ has remained (see 27).In recent years the criticisms of rural sociology in the United

States have continued with little respite. They were given an addedstimulus by the publication of Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times (160),Jim Hightower’s strident and partisan attack on America’s ’landgrant complex’ for being the quiescent clients of corporateagribusiness:

In their efforts with food gadgetry, in their work for the in-put and out-put in-dustries and in their mechanisation research, land grant colleges and state

agricultural experiment stations exist primarily as tax-paid clinics for

agribusiness. Land grant college research is directed toward those private in-terests that least need assistance, while it ignores or works against the interests ofthose who desperately need help. The advantage is all on one side -

agribusiness, millions; folks, zero. It is an outrageous allocation of publicresources (160, pp. 50-1)

The main force of Hightower’s attack is against agriculturaleconomics (see 107 and 156 for discussion of agriculturaleconomics’ ’own Watergate’). Rural sociology is depicted as ofonly secondary importance to the land grant complex - ’the step-children of the system’ (160, p. 51) - but Hightower does notspare it his vitriol; ’sociological bullshit’, in his view, constitutes’the bulk of rural sociology research’ (160, p. 56). After listingsome of the more arcane examples of recent research effort, he con-cludes :

Land grand college research for rural people and places is a sham. Despite occa-sional expressions of concern from land grant spokesmen, a look at the budgetsand research reports makes clear that there is no intention of doing anythingabout the ravages of the agricultural revolution. The focus will continue to be oncorporate efficiency and technological gadgetry, while the vast majority of ruralAmericans - independent family farmers, farm workers, small town businessmenand other rural residents - will be left ot get along as best they can, even if itmeans getting along to the city. If they stay in rural America, a rural sociologistwill come around every now and then to poke at them with a survey. (160, p. 57)

Whatever the validity of Hightower’s assertions, they were

presented with a force which could hardly be ignored. Americanrural sociologists, who had long prided themselves on their abilityto research into the problems of rural people now found that whathad customarily been regarded as their greatest strength was beingdismissed out of hand and even their motives were being impugn-ed.



20

To hard-pressed rural sociologists it seemed impossible to win.For over twenty years, they had been assailed by criticisms that theywere too concerned with applied research rather than with

sociological problems. Now they were being accused of failing torender a public service and indulging in research which was increas-ingly irrelevant to the needs of the rural population. PerhapsSewell’s prescriptions had been taken too much to heart, for Stokesand Miller (334, p. 416) noted in their review that

... a dedication to policy relevant, applied research may well have characterisedrural sociology during the 1930s and 1940s. It is difficult to make the same asser-tion today. Since 1965, Iess than one article in every ten dealt with social welfareand policy.

Stokes and Miller also discovered that over the same period morearticles in Rural Sociology were actually concerned with the self-evaluation of the discipline (334, pp. 417, 432) than with policy andwelfare issues. It seems plausible to suppose that rural sociologistshad concurred with Sewell’s judgements, withdrawn into their

ivory towers to conduct ’basic’ research on theoretical and concep-tual issues, thereby provoking the wrath of Hightower for beingtoo distanced from the problems of the real world. But the truesituation was more complicated than this, for Stokes and Millerhad found little overall change in the characteristics of the

discipline, while many of Hightower’s complaints were directed nottowards any concentration on abstract theorizing, but to the

triviality of much of the empirical work - an entirely familiar ac-cusation.The issues raised by Hightower could not, therefore, be fitted in-

to the ’applied’ versus ’basic’ categories used by Sewell, for criteriaof public accountability and social relevance were also invoked.However, in the light of Hightower’s comments the lesson to belearned from the , previous twenty years’ experience was that no-tions of ’basic’ and ’applied’ research represented a false antithesis,that indeed the major fallacy was to regard them as opposites oreven as alternatives. The real weakness was one of problem defini-tion : too much research was unimportant, inappropriate or in-consequential for both a sociological and a public audience. Thistheme was soon taken up in successive presidential addresses to theRSS. Copp, for example, acknowledged that a revolution had oc-curred in the structure of American agriculture since the Second



21

World War, but that rural sociologists had hardly paid any atten-tion to what this meant for the rural social structure (71, p. 528).Copp ascribed this extraordinary lapse to the lack of autonomy en-joyed by rural sociologists:

Perhaps in our sustenance relationship with USDA and the experiment stationswe have sacrificed some of our independence and been less incisive than we

might have been. (71, p. 526)

In the following year Ford also considered the issues raised byHightower’s polemic. For Ford the recent trend towards more’basic research’ was

to a considerable degree a reaction to the recognised theoretical and

methodological inadequacies of earlier research in the field, deficiencies whichhave been attributed in part to an over-zealous reform bent pursued at the ex-pense of technical competence. What I would criticise is the facile and dubiousassumption that conducting discipline research, especially if the subject of theresearch has been derived from a social problem, is tantamount to rendering apublic service.The truth is that we have seldom examined the social consequences of our

research...And certainly we can find no refuge in the vulnerable rationalisationthat ’what is good for the discipline is good for the public’. (111, pp. 376, 377.Emphasis in original.)

Ford’s comments were taken up in two subsequent papers onrural sociological research and social policy (267, 268) although theargument in each of them is basically similar. This is that the con-ventional view of rural sociology as an ’applied’ discipline is

mythical (268, p. 452); indeed that rural sociologists typically ’lacka clear vision of what policy research ought to look like’ (268,p. 446). The reasons for this are adduced to be both of those in-dicated by Copp and Ford - that is, they are both internal and ex-ternal to the discipline. The dependence on funding from the landgrant complex has abetted inconsequential research, but, somewhatin reaction to this, rural sociologists have also sought to impose anultimately self-defeating ’scientific’ research style in a misconceiv-ed attempt to compensate for the acknowledged inadequacies ofthe discipline. As Nolan and Hagan observe:

The point here is that, by adopting criteria such as those outlined by Sewell, ruralsociologists appear to have been drawn into defining problems and gatheringdata in such a way that the probabilities of being ’scientific’ are maximised but



22

relevance for policy is minimised. We wish to stress that we see no necessary cor-

respondence between one’s research problem and one’s method of analysis butthere may be strong proclivities which flow from a decision to ’scientificallyupgrade’ by using such analytical tools as multivariate analysis. In short, as longas rural sociologists allow a methodological tail to wag their research dog (as itseems is currently the case) they will never have very much to offer in the way ofsocial policy recommendations. (268, p. 444)

Moreover the pressures to appear ’scientific’ by the use of quan-titative techniques whatever the problem (see Stokes and Miller(334), who show that nearly ninety percent of rural sociologicalresearch is dependent upon a single data-gathering mode - thequestionnaire survey) is in turn a product of the institutional con-text of rural sociology. As Nolan and Galliher (267) indicate, only’hard’ data are usually considered acceptable in the research am-bience of the land grant complex, whatever the vagaries of sampl-ing and validity or considerations of relevance.The application of a ’scientific’, methodological rigour has

therefore proved to be a false solution, on its own, to rural

sociology’s fundamental weakness in specifying research problemsconsidered relevant both to a wider sociological audience and torural inhabitants themselves. There has certainly been no lack ofexhortations to reform in recent years, as many of the papers citedin this section have indicated, yet these weaknesses remain

endemic, thanks largely to institutional inertia. Lowry’s somewhatmelodramatic depiction of a ’sleeping crisis’ (220, p. 465) thereforebecomes easier to appreciate. The false antithesis between a ’scien-tific’ emphasis and a concern with rural problems, policies and pro-grammes has contributed to this crisis. On the one hand the in-fluence of rural sociologists in government in the United States haseroded considerably (220, p. 470) because of the neglect of policy-oriented research; yet on the other hand rural sociology retains itslow status among sociologists in general. A return to appliedresearch in its old form would only serve to renew the jibes about’fact gatherers’ and ’privy counters’, and grant a licence for doingshoddy research. American rural sociology by the mid-1970stherefore seemed to have reached an impasse caused by ’trained in-capacity’ (267, p. 496), an alarming state of affairs in view of theproselytizing zeal with which the research style of American ruralsociology had been carried abroad (325, 343). Furthermore, to

make matters worse, rural sociology was also in a state of sometheoretical disarray.



23

3

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Rural sociology’s ’aversion to theory’ has already been notedearlier in this report. Indeed it has been a common observation

about rural sociology that it has been atheoretical or even anti-

theoretical in its orientation. Although the grounds for these allega-tions are easy to understand it is possible to exaggerate the lack oftheoretical interest shown by rural sociologists and to mistake theinductivist approach which typifies rural sociological research forthe absence of any theoretical development. Bealer, for example,has made a stout defence of rural sociology’s theoretical contribu-tion, concluding that ’the field might not be as bad off when it

comes to &dquo;theory&dquo; as some might think’ (20, p. 472). This claimwill be examined in some detail in this section. However, thetheoretical problems which currently beset rural sociology cannotbe analyzed solely in terms of the history of rural sociology in theUnited States, since at various points in this history American ruralsociologists have relied heavily upon contributions from the moretheoretical and philosophical tradition in Europe (see 94, 171, 206,235).

Unfortunately the classic nineteenth-century European writers insociological theory devoted comparatively little attention to

agriculture and rural life, concentrating their efforts on the emerg-ing urban-industrial sector. The general approach was a briskdismissal of the significance of rural society as archaic and

backward, while economic and social innovation would emanatefrom the towns and from industry. Although rural life would inturn be transformed by these material and cultural innovations, itwas cast in the role of the passive receiver of these processes to bein turn moulded and adapted by them. Such a view underlies manyof the ’linked antitheses’ of nineteenth-century social thought iden-tified by Nisbet (266, Chapter 3) - notions such as ’traditional-modern’, ’mechanical and organic solidarity’, ’gemeinschaft-gesellschaft’. It also underlies more recent theories of industrial, orpost-industrial, society which equally regard the rural as residual(e.g., 24, 188). Recently Giddens has provided a provocative criti-que of this perspective, which he summarizes as follows:

The fundamental contrast in the modern world, it is held, is between traditional,agrarian society, normally based upon the dominance of landowning elites, sanc-



24

tioned by religion, though in reality often deriving from military power and co-ordinated within an authoritarian state; and industrial, urban society, fluid and’meritocratic’ in its structure, characterised by a diffusion of power among com-

petitive elites in which social solidarity is based upon secular exchange transac-tions rather than upon religious ethics or coercive military power, and in which

government is transformed into a mass democratic state...Conceptually, the

theory of industrial society involves a polar typology of forms of societal

organisation made familiar under a variety of names: ’status’ versus ’contract’,’mechanical’ versus ’organic’ solidarity, gemeinschaft versus gesellschaft, and soforth. (139, pp. 718-9)

Giddens, however, goes on to argue that this ’theory of industrialsociety’ must be abandoned or at least dismantled and its premisessubjected to scrutiny. He claims that

some or most of these assumptions are obsolete in an era when the main ’inter-nal’ divisions and strains in the advanced societies are no longer, as in the nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, based upon the tensions between the urban-industrial centres and the still strong centrifugal pull of a rural hinterland. (139,p. 719)

The theoretical trajectory of rural sociology has represented thisprocess in microcosm. It emerged very much within the theoreticalframework which Giddens criticizes, rooted in particular in Ton-nies’ conception of gemeinschaft-gesellschaft. However, as we haveseen, rural sociology in the United States departed in certain impor-tant respects from this model. It certainly did not share the ideathat rural life was marginal or backward. On the contrary muchrural sociology was devoted to upholding the integrity of what werebelieved to be the distinctive qualities of rural life. In addition thediligently empiricist style of research led to the careful scrutinywhich Giddens demands, for it was a form of research practicewhich impressed upon its practitioners the intractability of manyrural social phenomena to easy generalization. It was Sorokin andZimmerman who first sought to integrate the European tradition oftheorizing with this detailed empirical observation in their text-book, Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology (328), becomingresponsible for what, until the mid-1960s, formed the majortheoretical framework for rural sociological research: the rural-urban continuum. In the post-war period, however, the rural-urbancontinuum has been gradually dismantled in the face of further em-pirical findings which could not be assimilated into such a scheme.This has left a theoretical vacuum in rural sociology which, as yet,



25

remains unfilled, and which also accounts for the conceptual con-fusion over the term ’rural’ already alluded to earlier in this paper.

In a theoretical sense rural sociology therefore remains a

prisoner of its history. The fault lies not so much with Tonnies asthe way in which his original concepts of gemeinschaft andgesellschaft have been subsequently employed. For Tonnies theydescribed forms of association rather than actual social systems. In

purely formal terms gemeinschaft included any set of relationshipscharacterized by emotional cohesion, depth, continuity and fulfil-ment ; gesellschaft on the other hand, referred to the impersonal,the contractual and the rational aspects of human association. In

many respects these concepts, properly used, may retain some utili-ty as a heuristic device, but the use made of them quickly exhibitedtwo important aspects which now seem highly questionable. Firstthe concepts became reified - that is, gemeinschaft and

gesellschaft soon ceased to be tools of analysis and became insteadto be viewed as actual social structures which could be observedand enumerated. Secondly, and consequent upon this, they becameidentified with particular settlement patterns - in particular ge-meinschaft became identified with the rural village and gesellschaftwith the city. Tonnies himself was partly responsible for this for headopted the prevailing Arcadian view of rural life and argued thatgemeinschaft ’is stronger there and more alive’ (345, p. 35). But onthe whole he was careful to regard the twin concepts as forms ofassociation which, while differentially distributed across society,were present to varying degrees in all types of social structures andorganizations. Those writers who mischievously grounded ge-

meinschaft and gesellschaft in a rural-urban continuum were, froman urban perspective, Simmel in his essay ’The Metropolis andMental Life’ (1903) and Wirth in his famous paper ’Urbanism as aWay of Life’ (1938) and, in rural sociology, Sorokin and Zimmer-man (1929) and Redfield in his paper, ’The Folk Society’ (1947).

In many respects the rural-urban continuum was a thinly-veiledexpression of very common nineteenth-century cultural perspec-tives on rural life in academic sociological theory. By this means arange of literary and artistic conventions taken from the pastoralform became almost unproblematic assumptions about rural socie-ty, partly because they fitted in so well with the prevailing culturalperspective. Ruth Glass has, with some justification, referred tothis as



26

a lengthy, thorough course of indoctrination, to which all of us everywhere, haveat some time or other been subjected... Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world weare still conditioned to think in terms of a sharp distinction between rural and ur-ban places and ’ways of life’. And to many of us the adjective ’rural’ has plea-sant, reassuring connotations - beauty, order, simplicity, rest, grass-roots

democracy, peacefulness, gemeinschqfit. ’Urban’ spells the opposite - ugliness,disorder, confusion, fatigue, compulsion, strife, gesellschaft. (141, p. 142)

Once the broad characteristics of rural social traits had been deriv-ed it merely remained for the myriad American locality studiesfrom Galpin onwards to gauge the ’health’ of the individual com-munities concerned by matching them against such criteria. Veryfew, however, were used to examine the theoretical presuppositionsthemselves (cf. 271).Hence T6nnies original gemeinschaft-gesellschaft typology

became a rural-urban continuum in the hands of Sorokin and Zim-merman and later the folk-urban continuum of Redfield (see 217).Sorokin and Zimmerman’s aim was to establish the ’differentialcharacteristics of the urban and rural community whose totalitygives the type of each of these social aggregates’ (328, p. 15). Theydid so by listing the differences between rural and urban society ona number of dimensions - occupation, environment, size, density,etc. However, their approach to rural life is a hopelessly idealizedone. At one point Sorokin even conjures up a vision of happypeasants singing in the fields (ibid., p. 509). Nevertheless their text,together with its companion sourcebook (329) fixed the theoreticalframework of rural sociology for a generation. As late as 1957,Smith commended it as ’the finest synthesis of the field of ruralsociology achieved to date’ (325, p. 12). In view of this it is perhapsworthwhile quoting Sorokin and Zimmerman’s conclusions at

some length as a representative illustration of their approach:

Up to recent times, at least for the bulk of the city population, the city environ-ment, as such, has been much less natural and has given much less opportunityfor the satisfaction of basic human needs and fundamental impulses than therural environment ... Can such a city environment and manner of living satisfythese fundamental impulses and habit developed in quite a different situationand adapted to quite a different environment? The answer is no. Neither the im-pulses for creative activity; nor the orientation, curiosity and novelty; nor thelust for variety and adventure; nor the physiological needs for fresh air; ... northe physiological and psychological necessity for being in touch with nature; norto enjoy with eyes the greenishness of the meadows, the beauties of the forest,the clear rivers, the waves of golden wheat in the fields; nor to hear the birds sing-ing, the thunderstorm or the mysterious calm of an evening amidst nature; these



27

and thousands of similar phenomena have been taken from the urban man ... Inspite of the enormous improvement of the conditions of the urban labour classesin these respects, the city still has a great deal of these elements of ’unnaturality’and through that stimulates dissatisfactions and disorders.The farmer-peasant environment, on the contrary, has been much more

’natural’ and much more identical with that to which man has been trained bythousands of years of preceding history. The basic impulses of man, as they havebeen shaped by the past, are to be satisfied much easier in the environment andby the occupational activity of the farmer. There is neither lack of nature, northe killing monotony of work, nor extreme specialisation, nor one-sidedness. Hisstandard of living may be as low as that of a proletarian; his house or lodgingmay be as bad; and yet the whole character of his structure of living is quite dif-ferent and healthier and more natural. (328, pp. 466-7)

This Disneyland fantasy contains all the basic components of a

pastoral Arcadia, even down to the typical disregard of materialstandards for alleged (and often illusory) metaphysical benefits.While few would be so explicit, Sorokin was merely expressing acommonly-held elision of the aesthetic and social aspects of rurallife which underlay the whole approach of the rural-urban con-tinuum down to and including the work of Redfield. Indeed Red-field’s paper, though more sophisticated and more sociologicalthan Sorokin’s work, used much the same description of rural life- small-scale, isolated, agricultural, non-literate, homogeneousand with a strong sense of group solidarity (298; see also 21,pp. 42-53; 232, Chapter 2). Unfortunately both Sorokin’s and Red-field’s characterizations of rural society consisted as much of nor-mative prescription (or even wishful thinking) as of empiricaldescription. And as McGee has pointed out:

The main problem is that once the model of the rural-urban continuum, with itsfallacious assumptions of the nature of rural and urban society, is created, it

becomes rather like an institution - self-perpetuating and not to be criticised.(232, p. 43).

However, the rural-urban continuum was not simply a set of em-pirical generalizations: it was also intended to explain the nature ofsocial organization by reference to settlement patterns. Hence, asDuncan was later to observe

... there was an effort to develop a peculiar kind of sociology for rural people,under the illusion that they are a law unto themselves and cannot be accountedfor as are other social groups. It took a long time to discover that rural sociologyis nothing but sociology employing data about rural people and their socialbehaviour. (94, p. 8)



28

This ’discovery’ was based upon detailed empirical investigationat both the rural and urban ’ends’ of the continuum. Some doubt

was first introduced by Oscar Lewis’s restudy (209) of Tepoztlan,the original ’folk society’. Whereas Redfield had discovered ahomogeneous, smoothly functioning, well-integrated, contented,stable and harmonious community, Lewis emphasized

the underlying individualism of Tepoztlan institutions and character, the lack of

co-operation, the tensions between villages within the municipio, the schismswithin the village, the pervading quality of fear, envy, and distrust in interper-sonal relations. (210, p. 123)

This is a far cry from gemeinschaft, but it was a view of rural socie-ty that was to be repeated in a number of attacks upon the ’misplac-ed polarities’ of the rural-urban continuum during the 1960s (150;see also 26, 88, 157). Meanwhile disconcertingly gemineschaftlichcommunities were being discovered in the centre of large conurba-tions - the so-called ’urban villages’, which in reality were simplythe closely-knit neighbourhoods studied by the Chicago School inthe 1920s (see 129). Gans, in particular doubted the sociologicalrelevance of the terms ’rural’ and ’urban’ in advanced industrialsocieties. ’Ways of life’, he wrote, ’do not coincide with settlementpatterns’ (130, p. 114).

It remained for Pahl finally to dismiss the utility of the rural-urban continuum in his important critical article which appeared in1966. In effect, Pahl considered the concepts of ’rural’ and ’urban’to be neither explanatory variables nor sociological categories. Headduced evidence from community studies in both the UnitedStates and Europe to show that far from there being an exclusivecontinuum from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, relationships of bothtypes could be found in the same localities. Therefore, he argued,’Any attempt to tie patterns of social relationships to specificgeographical milieux is a singularly fruitless exercise.’ (276, p. 293)Instead Pahl believed that sociological analysis in rural areas

should concentrate on the confrontation between the local and thenational and that between the small-scale and the large-scale: ’it isthe basic situation of conflict or stress that can be observed fromthe most highly urbanised metropolitian region to the most remoteand isolated peasant village.’ (276, p. 286) The implications ofPahl’s arguments for the continuation of rural sociology in itstraditional form were profound. At a stroke he had demolished the



29

conceptual scheme upon which rural sociology had been basedsince Sorokin and Zimmerman, and indeed back to Galpin andTonnies. At the same time he had demonstrated that rural

sociology could no longer afford to consider the ’rural’ sector inisolation from the rest of society. Eighty years after the publicationof Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tonnies’s tools of analysis hadbeen restored to their correct ontological status while some of themore misleading aspects of his theoretical legacy had been exposed.Yet there seemed to be little which could take its place.

Unfortunately the almost institutional character of the rural-urban continuum to which McGee draws attention has resulted inan abundance of attempts to resurrect it as a viable explanatoryscheme (e.g. 114, 163, 183, 218, 221, 232, 292, 312). Most of theseefforts consist of cataloguing various demographic, economic andsocial differences between rural and urban inhabitants. Obviouslysuch differences continue to abound and can be quite easilydemonstrated and a great deal of American rural sociology, at

least, continues to consist of a codification of these differences.Bealer (20, p. 465) calls this ’the single most dominant &dquo;generalorientation&dquo; with a substantive referent’. It forms a ’shared tradi-

tion’ or ’rally point’ for the field (20, p. 466), although, as Bealernotes, whether this is an adequate or viable focus for rural

sociology is moot, to say the least. The issue at stake is not the lackof any rural-urban differences in behaviour, but the necessity ofdemonstrating any causal link between the concept of ’rural’ andparticular kinds of interaction. In the absence of such a link theconcept of ’rural’ becomes sociologically uninteresting, if not

spurious - like, say, Tuesday afternoon behaviour (see 27). Theinductivism which has typified rural sociology has compoundedthis problem, for just as it is possible to compare what occurs onTuesday afternoons with what occurs on Sunday mornings, sorural sociologists compared ’rural’ and ’urban’ ways of life. Andjust as, no doubt, Tuesday afternoon behaviour is different fromSunday morning behaviour, so differences were duly discoveredbetween rural and urban behaviour, and a whole branch of

sociology was devoted to making inventories of these differences. Itmust be apparent, however, that the discovery of these differencesdo not, in themselves, provide a justification for establishing arural sociology, any more than we could justify ’Tuesday afternoonsociology’ as a branch of the profession, create departmentsspecifically for the study of Tuesday afternoons and even found



30

learned socieites and hold international conferences on the theoryof Tuesday afternoons. As an essentially empirical, descriptiveterm the notion of ’rural’ is simply incapable of bearing any ex-planatory significance in this way.The fact that ’rural’ is not a sociologically defined category has

also been responsible for the problems of definition referred toearlier in this paper. In the past this problem was disguised by thecoincidence in most rural areas in advanced industrial societies of

residential and occupational locations. Rural sociology could

plausibly be defined as the study of those living in a rural locale andwho were engaged in, or closely allied to, the production of food.What has sapped the confidence of those rural sociologists activelyengaged in cataloguing rural-urban differences has been the disap-pearance of this demonstrably appropriate object of study (see 220,358). As the occupational basis of the rural population has becomeless homogeneous in all advanced industrial societies, so rural

sociologists have become less clear over what, precisely, constitutes’rural’. This needs little elaboration, for it has already been coveredearlier in this paper, except to emphasize one point. There is cer-tainly a sense in which Pahl overstated his argument, for, in thelimiting case, geographical milieux may define patterns of socialrelationships through the constraints which they apply to the localsocial structure - for example, the so-called ’tyranny of distance’(32). That is to say if social institutions are locality-based and ifthey are inter-related then there might be a ’local social system’(330) worthy of sociological attention - which we may, for thesake of convenience only, call ’rural’. But this is conditional on anumber of empirically-determined properties (which seem to bepresent, say, in many peasant societies) and that any causal connec-tion between the nature of this local social system and its ’rurality’is purely spurious - it merely stems from the inability of the in-habitants to transcend the spatial constraints imposed upon them,this incapacity being linked to inequalities rooted in a wider systemof social stratification rather than in a rural milieu per se. Thus, toparaphrase Pahl, there is no rural population as such; rather thereare specific populations which for varous, but identifiable reasonsfind themselves in rural areas (278, p. 105; see also 260, pp. 95-101,on which the latter part of this section is largely based).

In recent years these problems have been aired on a number ofoccasions in rural sociological journals (e.g. 27, 125, 220, 248, 296,358). And very recently there have been signs that some of the



31

chronic theoretical weaknesses of rural sociology may at last be inthe process of being confronted, especially in the United States (see141, 301). The deepening social crisis in rural America (see 160,161, 237, 284) may also prompt some fundamental re-thinking andhelp to overcome the institutional inertia of the land-grant com-plex. At the present time, however, the generally discredited rural-urban continuum has not been replaced by a new conceptual ap-paratus or set of theoretical problems which would provide ruralsociology with a new research agenda and a new impetus. What isrequired is not simply more abstract theorizing for its own sake, foran overdose of ’grand theory’ could prove as stultifying as the cur-rent surfeit of ’abstracted empiricism’ (242), but rather a recogni-tion that the construction of theory and empirical research are notnecessarily, or even preferably, separate exercises. We thereforereturn to the issue of problem formulation which concluded theprevious section. Currently the weaknesses of problem formulationseem to be perpetuated by the twin afflications of what Kaufman(186) in an early statement of the problem, called ’period fixation’and ’cafeteria research’ - in other words the lack of any historical

perspective (see also 206, p. 128) in rural sociology and the ’take-it-or-leave-it’ definition of research problems (and research funding)by those outside the discipline. Moreover the current situation oftheoretical anomie in rural sociology has contributed to thismalaise. It therefore seems unlikely that rural sociology can recoveruntil a more fertile theoretical framework is evolved which will pro-vide researchers with fruitful empirical problems to explore.

A Diversion into Urban Sociology

Rural sociology has not been alone in suffering from the distrac-tions of the rural-urban continuum. It also led urban sociologydown the same conceptual blind-alley (manifested in the form ofsocial area analysis) and a demise which was equally presaged by itsdownfall. Thus urban sociology has recently been confronted withexactly the same definitional problems and urban sociologists, liketheir counterparts, have been forced to come to terms with a topicarea whose scope is also defined in empirical, geographicalcategories rather than theoretical, sociological ones. The contrastbetween the two disciplines is a marked one, however. While ruralsociology has remained moribund, urban sociology has been reviv-



32

ed, if not transformed, by a radical re-appraisal of its purpose andpossibilities, including a considerable shift in the definition of whatconstitutes the field of ’urban’ itself. It is therefore worth in-

vestigating what rural sociology can learn from this discussion.The work of two writers may be taken as emblematic of these

new developments in urban sociology: David Harvey and ManuelCastells. It is, of course, not coincidental that Harvey and Castellsboth write within a similar, though not entirely coincidental, Marx-ist framework, for Marxist theory directs them towards a holisticsolution of the crisis which they both perceive in urban sociologyand, indeed, in the lives of many urban inhabitants. However, it isnot their specifically Marxist approach which is at issue here, buttheir incisive critique of the tradition of urban sociological theoryand research handed down from the Chicago School and locatedwithin the framework of the rural-urban continuum. There are

numerous echoes in this critique of the situation in rural sociology.Castells, for example, regards urban sociology as a field in searchof a subject-matter. It has no specific theoretical object of study,but is merely an ’empiricist assertion’ (56, p. 66). Elsewhere hewrites that:

If a sociological paradox were still necessary it would not be the least of

paradoxes, namely, that after fifty years existence only one subject for researchin urban sociology remains untackled: its subject-matter. (55, p. 59)

The reasons which Castells adduces for this state of affairs are

basically similar to those which have afflicted rural sociology: thediscovery that ’urbanism as a way of life’ is not restricted to cities;the ultimate bankruptcy of what he calls ’the reassuring fields offact-gathering’ (55, p. 42); the inability to define the field of ’ur-ban’ once it is assumed that the totality of ’modern’ societies arecharacterized by an urban culture. Urban sociology can only besalvaged where spatial units and social units coincide - that is,where there exists what in the previous section was termed a ’localsocial system’. However, as Castells points out, the forces of ad-vanced industrial society tend to destroy such local autonomy,rendering such self-contained urban social systems ’vague recollec-tions’ (55, p. 59) before the ’eclipse of community’ (332) set in (seesection on ’Community’ below). Castells therefore suggests thatmost ’urban’ sociology is not the study of anything specifically ur-ban at all:



33

Now the fundamental point is this: everything described by Wirth as ’urbanism’is in fact the cultural expression of capitalist industrialisation, the emergence ofthe market economy and the process of rationalisation of modern society. (55,p. 38)

Castells therefore seeks to regard the ’urban’ as merely onemanifestation of the overall development of (capitalist) society. Anunderstanding of urbanism and urbanization must, he argues, besought in the general processes of capitalist society and howcapitalism distributes resources - primarily economic, but alsospatial - around the population:

The coincidence between certain characteristic types of behaviour and the con-stitution of large agglomerations in industrial society can often be misleading. Infact this is a typical case of spurious correlation. Transformations in the

technico-social base of society lead both to new types of social relations and to anew form of spatial organisation. The theoretical coherence of the process can-not be discovered by inter-relating the elements which co-exist on the surface ofreality, but only by establishing the relations between structural elements

through which this surface is itself organised. (56, p. 69)

This is an argument with which Harvey concurs:

Many investigators, after a ritualistic bow to the notion of totality which assertsthat cities are not just statistical aggregates of things and activities, quicklyreduce their problem (in the name of competence or tractability) to the analysisof things and activities. The insights gained from such investigations are not tobe dismissed - in fact they are invaluable raw material out of which we mayfashion a conception of urbanism. But their net import is that we learn todeal...’with problems in the city rather than of the city’.Urbanism has to be regarded as a set of social relationships which reflects the

relationships established throughout society as a whole. Further, these relation-ships have to express the laws whereby urban phenomena are structured,regulated and constructed. (153, pp. 303-4)

It follows from this that Castells and Harvey seek to establishtwo closely interlinked, but analytically separable, theories: a

theory of social development (which, as Marxists, they would bothlocate in the capitalist mode of production) and a theory of thesocial production and organization of space. Castells, for example,regards the ’urban’ as the spatial expression of the processes of ac-cumulation and centralization in advanced capitalist societies.Since industrial sociology has concentrated on the sphere of pro-duction, urban sociology



34

has tackled a multitude of problems whose connection is that they belong to thesphere of collective consumption, that is to say, of consumption processes whoseorganisation and management cannot be other than collective given the natureand size of the problems: e.g. housing, collective facilities, leisure provisions,etc. (56, p. 75)

One aspect of urban sociology is therefore a sociology of collectiveconsumption. Perhaps fortunately, given some of the searchingcritiques to which this concept has been subjected (e.g. 277) ruralsociology cannot fruitfully adopt this notion, if only because thespheres of production and consumption so often coincide in

agriculture - i.e. ’home’ and ’work’ are rarely separate or

separable. This in turn is linked to the very different nature of

capitalist development in agriculture to that which predominates inmanufacturing industry (see below).

Nevertheless, the production of spatial forms, to which Castellshas granted less attention (see 57, 58) is clearly more important inthe context of rural sociology, if only because the importance ofland as a factor of production in agriculture necessitates a more ex-tensive use of space than occurs in most other industries. Here theconnection between the social structure and the spatial structurebecomes crucial. Harvey, as a geographer, is more appreciative ofthis point:

We must relate social behaviour to the way in which the city assumes a certaingeography, a certain spatial form. We must recognise that once a spatial form iscreated it tends to institutionalise and, in some respects, to determine the futuredevelopment of social process. We need, above all, to formulate concepts whichwill allow us to harmonise and integrate strategies to deal with the intricacies ofsocial process and the elements of spatial form. (153, p. 27)

How can these generalized prescriptions be applied to rural

sociology? For Harvey and Castells, of course, the same processthat produces an ’urban’ spatial form is also responsible for the’rural’ sector. The countryside becomes ’ruralized’ as the obverseof the ’urbanization’ of cities, due to the gravitation of industry,commerce, services and the ’means of collective consumption’ tourban areas (cf. 238). The ’spatial form’ of society is thereforereducible to the nature of land use (see 153, Chapter 5) moulded bymarket and/or planned economic factors. The terms ’rural’ and’urban’ therefore initially represented a division of labour betweenagriculture and manufacturing industry, the latter making a highly



35

intensive use of space while agriculture used, and to a large extentstill uses, space (land) in a very extensive manner. As a preliminarystatement it might therefore be possible to suggest that the divisionof society into ’rural’ and ’urban’ areas is simply the spatial ex-pression of the division of labour. However, it would be quitemistaken to suggest such a mechanistic economic determinism, sincethis spatial form is institutionalized in socio-legal rights of propertyownership which, in many respects, shape and mould the allocativeprocess. Similarly a naive ecological determinism must also be re-jected, for the links between topographical and climatic features,the system of land use, the organization of landholding and the(rural) social structure do not run in any deterministic manner. Un-fortunately, however, it is precisely at this point that the contribu-tion of rural sociology has proved to be so lacking. Rural

sociologists have proved to be signally uninterested in macro-

sociological theories which would explain the emergence of par-ticular ’rural’ spatial and social forms; indeed, as we have seen,classic sociological theory has not, in any case, served rural

sociology particularly well in this respect. Within rural sociologythere also remains a great need for studies of how, for example,under similar technological and ecological conditions, the propertyrelationships which underpin the processes of agricultural produc-tion have been influenced by the historical development of thesocieties within which they are located. Indeed rural sociology’smeagre contribution in this area has been limited to countlessstudies of the effects of customs, traditions, or more generally’values’ in hindering the spread of technological innovation (forsummaries see 182, 302). It is as though, from rural sociology’sstandpoint, the only barrier to modern agricultural developmentwere the failure to communicate new techniques of production;otherwise it is sufficient to rely upon naive theories of technologicalor ecological determinism (cf. Galjart, (124) for a critique of thisapproach). There have been few attempts, then, to develop asystematic political economy of agriculture, nor a comparativetheory of rural social structures under similar economic conditions.

If the recent revival of interest in urban sociology is any guide,this is the kind of research agenda which rural sociology must setitself. This is not to argue that the debate within urban sociologycan be simplistically transferred to a rural context, for this would,



36

among other things, imply that agriculture develops according tothe same process as other industries, and this, as we shall see, is notnecessarily the case. Nor, for that matter, does it imply that ruralsociology must slavishly follow the ’new’ urban sociology into themany, perhaps irresolvable, problems which the latter has

manifested (see 277). However, rural sociology can usefully learnfrom its example of adopting a more holistic approach which ad-dresses itself explicitly to the question of rural change under theconditions which predominate in advanced industrial societies,although how far the institutional context of rural sociologicalresearch will allow such issues to be explored must remain ques-tionable. Criticism is, however, easy; it is much more difficult to

outline how such a rural sociology might proceed. Nevertheless, thecurrent crisis in rural sociology demands that such a research agen-da should be formulated in a more exact and detailed form. The

organization of the material which follows is intended to suggestsuch a scheme, beginning with the most important resource in ruralareas: land.

4

LANDHOLDING AND THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE

In subsistence or near-subsistence economies access to and controlover land is, almost by definition, a crucial resource; the structureof landholding is therefore both a cause of and closely follows thestructure of power in such societies. Moreover, even in thosesocieties which can no longer be described as underdeveloped, theimportance of land as a factor of production in agriculture and as amajor concentration of wealth and capital ensures that the struc-ture of landholding remains decisive in shaping both the economicand the social structures of rural society. Precisely how landholdingis related to the social structure has been a matter of considerabledebate - though not a problem to which rural sociologists havedevoted much attention. The crucial mediating variable is the con-cept of property, or more precisely property rights, a considerationof which takes us well beyond the bounds of conventional ruralsociology. Nevertheless it is helpful in this context to consider thisproblem in terms of the interrelationship between three analyticalcategories: the economics of agricultural production, property rela-



37

tionships, and the rural social structure.The precise nature of the interrelationship between these

categories has been a matter of fierce and continuous debate forcentures - in jurisprudence, political and moral philosophy,political economy and, latterly, in sociology. Among the ’classical’sociological theorists Marx paid particular attention to this pro-blem in volume three of Capital (227); Weber gave it equally impor-tant consideration in his ’agricultural sociology’ of the ancient em-pires and the Prussian ruling class (362). In the United States in-vestigation along these lines passed from Veblen (351) into thehands of ’institutional economists’ like Commons (68) and thencebeyond the purview of sociologists. In Europe, the ’agrarian ques-tion’ in Germany kept the issue alive, enabling Karl Kautsky to pro-duce his important revisionist thesis of Marx (187). But, as hasalready been indicated earlier in this report, the primary interst ofsociologists has been directed elsewhere, towards a consideration orurban industrialism, where the nature of landholding was assum-ed to be less significant. Consequently these issues have been

neglected for some time, particularly within rural sociology. Forexample, Stokes and Miller (334) found that only 0.2 percent of thepapers which they examined were concerned with land tenure. Onlyrecently has the revival of peasant studies led to a renewed interestin the relationship between landholding and the social structure,particularly within the Marxist tradition (see, for example, 93, 319,and the literature summarized and assessed in 101).

Within the confines of rural sociology as operationally defined inthis report, the most extensively cited paper on landholding and thesocial structure is that by Stinchcombe (333). Indeed Stinchcombeis one of the very few sociologists in the post-war period explicitlyto relate property rights to rural class relations and to do so on acomparative basis. As he points out, property rather than occupa-tion tends to be the defining principle of the stratification system inrural societies, and, rather than the division of labour per se, it isthe organization of property relationships which shapes the natureof the rural class structure. For this reason agriculture has alwayssat uneasily beside most attempts to produce occupational rankingsderived largely from an urban-industrial standpoint. Hence studiesof social mobility like those of Lipset and Bendix (212) and Blauand Duncan (33) have tended to ’classify all farmers together andregard them as an unstratified source of urban workers’ (333,p. 183). This tendency to relegate the rural population to an amor-



38

phous mass - something which Lenski (208, pp. 382-386) calls the’farming class’ - without even distinguishing between landownersand propertyless agricultural workers - has largely resulted frommisguided attempts to apply urban-based occupational classifica-tions to a rural context. Stinchcombe attempted to remedy thissituation by deriving a typology of rural class relations based uponlegal privileges, life styles, technical expertise, political participa-tion and property relations. Various configurations of these

characteristics were associated by Stinchcombe with five types ofagricultural enterprise: manorial or hacienda agriculture, family-size tenancy, family smallholding, plantation agriculture and

capitalist extensive or ’ranch-’type agriculture. (There are some in-teresting, and overlooked, parallels between this and the schemeput forward by Sorokin et al. (329, Vol. 1, pp. 558-645)). One ofthe curious features of Stinchcombe’s typology, however, is that ithas stimulated very little empirical research in the issues to which hedraws attention, despite the self-confessed need for the verificationof many of the assertions made by Stinchcombe. Whether this isdue to the somewhat static, ahistorical and descriptive nature ofStinchcombe’s categorizations (as, for example, Goss et al. (145)suggest) or whether the institutional base of rural sociology hasdirected attention away from this area (it may be significant thatStinchcombe himself is not a rural sociologist) is an open question.Nevertheless the silence is quite striking.One of the factors responsible for this is undoubtedly the un-

familiarity of rural sociologists with handling the concept of pro-perty, which, as Stinchcombe rightly asserts, lies at the heart of anyrural stratification system. Perhaps, as Kiernan suggests,

In humdrum times property has been taken for granted like other establishedfacts, in whatever local guise it may wear. Academic thinking has usually beenapt to overlook it ... For some time now sociology seems to have considered thewhole subject as threadbare, used up. (189, p. 362)

There seems little doubt that the institution of property has been’taken for granted’ in rural sociology, despite its manifest impor-tance not only in defining access to, and benefit from, crucialeconomic resources, but in being one of the major institutions thatsecures the reproduction of the rural class structure on an inter-generational basis (346). Thus although there is no lack of agree-ment over the fact that property represents a crucial aspect of the



39

rural social structure, there has been a surprising lack of emphasison the institution of property in recent empirical studies (see, 263,303). In general, the issue of property, particularly that of landtenure, is only taken seriously by rural sociologists in the

underdeveloped world, where the consideration of land reform hasmade it unavoidable (see 89). Elsewhere it has, with a few excep-tions (e.g. 30, 279), been overlooked. Textbooks in rural sociologytend either to pass by with a brief nod in this direction (e.g. 216,p. 309ff) or resort to unsubstantiated generalization, such as thefollowing:

The extent to which the ownership and control of land is concentrasted in a fewhands or widely distributed among those who live from farming is probably themost important single determinant of the welfare of the people on the land.Throughout the world wherever there is a widespread distribution of landownership and control one also observes (1) the strongest propulsions to steadywork and the maximum of thrift, (2) the highest average levels and standards ofliving, (3) the least development of social stratification, the fewest class distinc-tions, the relative absence of caste, and very little class conflict or class struggle,(4) a high degree of vertical social mobility so that the individual comes nearestto occupying the social position commensurate with his natural abilities and theamount of effort he personally is willing and able to put forth, (5) general in-telligence that is at a high level and minimum in range, and (6) a rural populationpossessed of well-rounded and highly developed personalities. (324, p. 297)

One might be more willing to forgive these glib assumptions foistedupon a generation of rural sociology students had they (once thetautologies had been disentangled from the testable propositions)provoked the necessary empirical research to establish their. validi-ty. It is fair to say, however, that recent work, even in the UnitedStates, would question these assumptions (see, for example, 4, 378,379).The concept of property is not, of course, an easy one to handle,

which might also account for the reticence of rural sociologists inthis area. As Denman has pointed out, men have theorized aboutproperty from the earliest days of recorded thought without arriv-ing at any consensus on ’this most ambiguous concept’ (84, p. 90;also 83, 85, 86, 87), and it lies well beyond the bounds of this reportto consider the long history of writing on this topic (for useful sum-maries, see 198, 223, 299, 309). This would be particularly com-plicated because of the highly complex nature of the legal rights -

principally rights of benefit, control and alienation (223) - whichare embedded in the notion of property. Bazelon, somewhat,whim-



40

sically, underlines this point quite well:

In a modern law school, some of the best all-round fun is had in arriving at a. definition of property. The faculty considers it a first essential for the develop-ment of legal technique to tease the apprentice lawyers out of their ordinaryreceived notions.

First off, the basic image of property - land and things - is pooh-poohed;then the search for a definition is carried through contract rights, choses in ac-tion (unrealised rights, including claims in court), and other intangibles. Theclass then thinks that it has the answer: property is rights - called propertyrights or, in the short form, property. This is the point at which the modern pro-fessor enjoys himself most, and to confound the class completely he pulls out acase in which a property right is recognised and enforced by a court for the firsttime - a good one is the early radio broadcasting case in which a court first heldthat the right to broadcast a description of a baseball game ’belonged’ to thebaseball club, could be disposed of by it, and could not be pirated by a partylacking contractual privilege from the ’owner’. Then the coup de gr&ce: did the

court enforce the club owner’s right because it was a property right, or was it a

property right because the court enforced it? The silence thunders, a rainbow ofa smile settles on the professor’s face, and the pot of gold is indicated: propertyis a right of use or disposition which will be enforced by a court. On that day weare men: and the legal elite is then prepared to go out, tautology in hand, andgrow rich creating and defending such rights.

But a whisper of doubt remains as older tautologies assert themselves: land island, to own is to own, and all property, like land, is supposed to be owned. (17,p. 53)

It is the task of sociologists to break down these tautologies byrelating the evolution of property rights to the changing structureof society, a relationship in which some form of reciprocal causa-tion will undoubtedly be present. Property rights are not only rightsauthoritatively defined - which introduces crucial sociologicalquestions of power and legitimacy (see 68, 84, 185, 303) - but theyare a set of rules affecting resource allocation and hence thedistribution of life-chances (see Weber’s consideration of property(361)). In this sense, sociologists have a real contribution to makeby assessing the extent to which the proliferation of legal categoriesof ownership have resulted in real changes in control and benefit orthe extent to which they are a legalistic mystification. In particularsociologists can resist the temptation to reduce the discussion ofproperty rights to a purely technical (legalistic) exercise by placingthis discussion in a broader social context, relating to the structureof inequality, distributional justice and the balance between in-dividual and communal rights. This is an important function in an



41

era when the complexity of property rights is increasing in all ad-vanced capitalist societies, largely for reasons of tax avoidance. Asfar as rural sociologists are concerned this is particularly importantbecause rights over land represent the keystone of rural society,determining and being determined by the exigencies of agriculturalproduction and the socio-political structure. In the absence of anysustained empirical investigation of these issues in the advancedcapitalist societies, however, it is possible only to raise them here,rather than provide any summary of current findings. Research inthis area is desparately needed.What we are left with are a few scattered writings on land tenure,

which might be regarded as a sub-section of the considerationsoutlined above. Land, however, is a factor of production which hasvery special qualities that introduce a number of peculiarities intothe rural class structure. It is, for example (relatively) fixed in quan-tity ; certainly its quantity cannot be increased in the short term andneither can it be transferred from one physical location to another.Land therefore constitutes a natural monopoly: it cannot be pro-duced and reproduced at a variable price. Moreover, even thoughthe quality of land can, in some instances, be improved quite quick-ly - by the addition of fertilisers, for example - even the limits ofthis can be quite strictly defined by the nature of topography andclimate. Therefore land, unlike machinery or other forms of work-ing capital, cannot become mobile according to the dictates ofmarket conditions. Not only is land less mobile to enter or leavedifferent enterprises of production, but exclusive property rightsensure that land is also a property monopoly. The major decisionwhich landowners must face is therefore one of utilization. In cer-tain specific instances this may mean considering alternative uses toagriculture, but for the majority it will mean a decision whether ornot to withdraw a portion of land from agricultural production.The main choices are quantitative rather than qualitative and hencein times of economic depression land tends to be simply withdrawnfrom cultivation rather than switched to an alternative use,

agricultural or otherwise. Compared with other industries

agricultural landowners are relatively insensitive to market patterns- most have little choice other than to use their land for

agricultural purposes.This relative inflexibility of land - both geographically and

qualitatively - renders landownership a specific and peculiarcategory of the ownership of the means of production in general.



42

These peculiarities were first recognized by Ricardo and later

elaborated by Marx and Kautsky. In recent years the theoreticalanalysis of land tenure has consequently occurred mostly within theambit of Marxist writing, especially on the concept of rent. Thishas been a concern which has emerged from two somewhatseparate areas of Marxist analysis: the feudal mode of production,and in particular the complex problem of conceptualizing feudalrent within Marxist categories (see, for example, 165, 166, 349);and the capitalist development of the city (see 153, 154, 96, 97, 13).Much of this literature has recently been summarized and appliedto an empirical analysis of landownership in Great Britain byMassey and Catalano (228). Its relevance to American agriculture isexplored in Goss et al. (144). All of these analyses follow in thetradition of Ricardo who noted that not only is land incapable ofbeing increased in quantity in the short term, but the quality of aparticular piece of land is not transferable. Land of above averagefertility produces above average yields, but this inequality is deter-mined by natural conditions and thus a (relatively) fixed quantity.This also applies to the opportunity-cost of the land, since this, too,is determined by its geographical location. By its very characterthen, land may furnish a surplus product from agricultural produc-tion or ground-rent.Under capitalism, where land becomes a commodity and lan-

downership is sanctified by capitalist property rights, ground renthas two components: differential rent and absolute rent (see 227; athird type of rent, monopoly rent, has been identified by Marxisturban sociologists and economists - see 97, 153 - but this re-mains a contentious issue). Differential rent arises from the super-profits accrued from land of high natural productivity and enablesthe function of landownership to be separated from that of

agricultural commodity production under capitalism. Massey andCatalano define this succinctly:

Capitalists located on plots of land with certain characteristics may require lesscapital to produce a given quantity of output than do those capitalists located onother less favoured plots. Consequently, the individual price of production (perunit of output) on more favoured plots will be lower than the price of produc-tion for the sector. The capitalist located on a favoured plot of land willtherefore make surplus profits equivalent to the difference between that in-dividual price of production and the ruling price of production. As land is a con-dition of production, it enables the owner to ’intercept’ these surplus profits;they are paid as (differential) rent, and the capitalist is left with the average rateof profit. (228, p. 42).



43

The immobility of land and the exclusivity of property rightstogether ensure that the increased competition, which in an

analogous industrial situation would reduce super-profits are cir-cumscribed. Rack-renting - which means no more than chargingwhat the market will bear for the rent of a particular plot of land -ensures also that the whole of the surplus profit which results willaccrue to the landowner, leaving the tenant cultivator the averageprofits accuring from commodity production (which Marx explicit-ly assumes to be equal to the price of production on the worst soil).As long as the landowner continues to charge the full market rent,the tenant will also be forced to maximize the output of his enter-

prise (in order to meet his rental payments). Indeed, this may be anecessity if the tenant is to remain in business, for while the lan-downer may possess a local monopoly over land, there is no hin-drance to competition over tenancies which may force the rent upto the market level.

Absolute rent also derives from the local monopoly over land.This enables landlords to require payment for the use of land,regardless of whether super-profits are generated there. This ab-solute profit exists because landowners refuse to release land forproduction without a payment. This incremental rent is thereforederived from all farms regardless of their fertility and location. Itraises a barrier to investment and hence, unlike differential rent,drives the price of commodities in that sector above their price ofproduction. It is apparent that absolute rent is dependent upon theprivate ownership of land. There is, however, more controversyover the necessary conditions of differential rent (see 228). A con-ventional view has been to regard differential rent as a necessary ef-fect of the capitalist mode of production (164) and not dependentupon the particular form of social relations involved in the owner-ship of land. In other words, private landownership could beabolished, but differential rent, according to this view, would be re-tained (165, p. 294). But this, according to Massey and Catalano,

... is to confuse the surplus value produced with the specific form it takes as

rent. All that these unequal conditions [of production] imply is unequal costsand therefore unequal rates of profit. For surplus value to exist as rent requiresspecifiable conditions of landownership. For precisely this portion of surplusvalue (excess profit) to be appropriated as differential rent requires the existenceof specific mechanisms which can be analysed as producing that result...Theprecise portion of surplus value taken as rent by the capitalist State under a situa-tion where land is nationalised is determined as a result of political class struggle,and is a matter for concrete investigation. (228, pp. 44-45)



44

Thus differential rent is not merely a tax on producers whatever theform of landownership, but rather a form of appropriation whichmay vary under different historical conditions. This, as shouldbecome clear below, is an important point when it comes to

developing an understanding of variations in the pattern of land-holding - and, therefore, in the rural class structure - of differentadvanced industrial societies.

It is the existence of differential rent, however, which grants to

agricultrue a unique class structure (see 283 for a useful summary).Analysts in the Marxist tradition, such as Lenin and Kautsky,acknowledged that the commercialization of agriculture is markednot only by the growing market-orientation of agricultural produc-tion, but by the emergence of a fully-fledged commercial landlord-tenant system - and, as a further corollary, proletarianization ofthe agricultural labour force. A subsistence landlord/peasant-based agriculture is replaced by the tri-partite structure of landlord,tenant farmer and landless farm labourer. This was the systemwhich characterized British agriculture from the eighteenth centuryonwards. As capitalism penetrated agriculture the peasantry wasdestroyed - polarized between a landless proletariat and a petit-bourgeois tenantry - and the division between landownership andthe cultivation of the land became relatively clear-cut. It was this

process which led Marx to make his comments about the peasantrybeing ’non-existent, historically speaking’ (a remark which he laterrecanted). However, while the natural monopoly in land and theexistence of ground rent enabled a separate landowning class toemerge, these very factors, paradoxically, have hindered the paceof capitalist development in agriculture. The rapid rationalizationand concentration of landownership and commodity production inagriculture is prevented by the institution of private property inland, even though private ownership is itself a necessary conditionfor capitalist development. Agriculture is frequently the first sectorof production to be penetrated by capitalism, but it also lagsbehind other sectors in retaining a sizeable petit-bourgeois group ofproducers long after other sectors have exhibited pronouncedmonopolistic tendencies (16, 144). The rate of capitalistic penetra-tion may therefore vary considerably among different, albeit im-peccably capitalist, rural societies, with equally considerable varia-tions in the rural class structure. (For an example of wherecapitalist penetration actually created a quasi-peasantry - in theScottish Highlands - see 174.) This is another example in rural



45

sociology of where rigorous, comparative historical research is con-spicuously lacking. (There are, of course, many local and nationalstudies which examine these issues empirically, but little

theoretically-oriented comparative analysis. Among the more

widely-cited case studies are: 78, 225, 289, 322. See also 284.)It is hardly coincidental that the most attention has been paid to

the nature of the links between landholding and the rural socialstructure in the study of peasant societies, where prevailinglandlord-tenant relationships constitute the most salient feature ofthe system of rural social stratification. Although much of thisliterature lies beyond the purview of this report, it is worth men-

tioning in passing that the persistence of a quasi-subsistencepeasantry in even the most advanced capitalist economies (for ex-ample, France, Germany, Switzerland) provides an apt illustrationof the unevenness of capitalist development in agriculture cited inthe preceeding paragraph. Indeed, it was the worry that the Euro-

pean peasantry was destined to remain a stubborn presence after allin the organization of agriculture which prompted Kautsky’sanalysis of the ’agrarian question’ and the long debate within Ger-man and Austrian socialist politics in the early decades of this cen-tury (14, 213, Ch. 4). More recently the ’final phase’ of the Euro-pean peasantry has been announced (115), but this appears unlikelyin the light of the political considerations which currently underliethe EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy. These interpretationsmust, of course, depend upon how the peasantry is defined (319,243), but there can be little doubt that technological innovation andthe need for capital accumulation in agriculture not only continual-ly advance the margin of economically viable plots of land, but, bydiminishing the need for hired albour, create productive unitswhich, if not ’peasant’ in character, are at least ones in which thefamily is newly self-sufficient. The peasantry in Europe in part sur-vives because its nature has been transformed. In some respects thishas involved production, not so much for direct subsistence butwith the express purpose of participation in the market, with smallplots continuing to exist in the interstices of the larger capitalistenterprises, often avoiding direct competition with them (see 261).The basis of their survival as commodity producers will, however,be considered more fully in the next section.At this point it is necessary only to note the effects which the sur-

vival of the peasantry has upon the structure of landholding. Itsmost demonstrable effect is to place a brake on the two broad



46

movements which distinguish agrarian capitalism - accumulationand centralization (14; the effects on rural social structure withinstate socialist societies will be considered in a later section).Agriculture follows these general tendencies of the so-called ’lawsof motion’ of the capitalist mode of production, but the process is,as Kautsky pointed out, more complicated in agriculture than inmanufacturing industry:

To begin with, industrial means of production can be multiplied, whereas inagriculture land is, within the given conditions, a fixed resource... In agriculturethe big landowner cannot generally increase his wealth except through centralisa-tion, recruiting several holdings into one. In industry accumulation proceeds in-dependently of centralisation: a big capital can farm without suppressing theautonomy of the lesser enterprises. When this suppression occurs, it is the effectof the formation of big industrial capital. Accumulation is here the startingpoint. On the contrary, where the land is fragmented into different propertiesand where small ownership prevails, large holdings can only acquire land by cen-tralising several smaller ones. The disappearance of the smaller holdings is thusthe precondition for the formation of a larger enterprise. But this is not enough;it is also necessary that the holdings that are expropriated should form a con-tinuous surface. (14, p. 30)

Unless the small landowner is to be removed by coercive force - anot unfamiliar feature of the transition from feudalism to

capitalism (246, 338) - his ambitious neighbours must wait forhim either to become bankrupt or run out of heirs. In the meantimesuch small properties present stubborn obstacles to the growth ofbig landed conglomerations.

These factors account for the peculiar structure of landholdingto be found in more advanced capitalist societies: the numericaldomination of small-scale, petit bourgeois landowners, who, whilebeing responsible, in most cases, for only a small proportion ofagricultural production (to be considered in the following section),can represent an important political force in influencing the direc-tion of state intervention in agriculture - as a glimpse at thehistory of the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy soon remindsus. They may also have a disproportionate influence culturally -witness the ’frontier’ ideology in the United States and the underly-ing Jeffersonian assumptions concerning private property as a

guarantor of individual and collective liberty (47, 48). All of thissuggests that predictions concerning the emergence of a universallandlord-tenant system as characteristic of capitalist agriculturehave proved to be very limited in extent (see 326, p. 505 on this



47

’rather unique social entity’). Many of the accoutrements of

agrarian capitalism identified by early Marxist writers - the

growth of landlordism increases in scale and size of enterprise, thecentralization of production - have occurred only very slowly(and mostly in the most highly capital-intensive sectors of

agriculture) with some significant reversals of this general trend, asin, for example, the breaking-up of the landed estates in Britainbetween 1918 and 1923 (347). On the contrary the existence oflarge-scale landholding units appears to occur only under certainspecific historical and/or topographical conditions. For example,in Europe large estates are to be found where they have survived thetransition from feudalism to capitalism or under conditions wherea landowning class has been instrumental in the process of commer-cialization by instigating a ’revolution from above’ (246). Indeedthe precise ways in which landowners have become involved in, orreacted to, such changes has, as Moore has demonstrated, fun-damentally affected the modernization process. In the case of Ger-many, for example, the promotion of both industrialism and thecommercialization of agriculture by landowners produced a cor-porate state in which they could participate (138, Ch. 14; 246,Ch. 8). In England, on the other hand, the commercialization ofagriculture preceded the process of industrialization by a century ormore and while the landowning class promoted the former, it large-ly (though not entirely) reacted to the latter (347) and subsequentlylost control of the major functions of the state, being forcedpolitically onto the defensive (see 315).

Outside Europe, however, it is the experience of colonialismwhich has been paramount in fashioning the landholding structureof the advanced agrarian societies. While in some regions this hasinvolved the installation of a large-scale commercial landowningclass, the most characteristic structure of landholding has not beenthe private estate but the family smallholding. In some cases (forexample the mid-West of the United States, parts of Canada,Australia and New Zealand) this was a deliberate policy of the stateto regulate the size of holding, often in reaction to the private estatestructure of the European metropolis. Such policies were em-bodied, for example, in the American Homestead Act of 1862.Such a pattern of landownership has clearly affected the socialstructure of these areas and rendered the political activity of theselandowner/cultivators very different to that which has prevailed inWestern Euorope (see 146, Ch. 1; 4, 25). This direct intervention of



48

the state in the regulation of landownership is therefore a factorwhich needs to be incorporated into any theory of landownership.The differing role of the state in directing the historical develop-ment of landownership in Western Europe and its former colonialsatellites is again something which requires systematic cross-

national study.Under conditions of small-scale landownership centralization

can proceed only slowly, the pace depending upon the degree oftenacity of the small landowner, his economic and social needs andthe economies of scale which are available in any particular branchof commodity production. The capacity of the lan-

downer/cultivator to ’hang on’ in the face of apparently over-whelming economic odds is now well documented (see, for exam-ple, 65, Ch. 7, 63, 123). Because movement off the land is fre-

quently a downward social move, in terms of both class and status,even part-time employment elsewhere may be preferred to a com-plete break with the land (115). Moreover economies of scale are byno means uniformly available in all forms of agricultural produc-tion. For these reasons the rate of concentration of landholdingmay be very slow indeed: for example, it has taken more than ten

years to increase the average size of holding in the EEC by onesingle hectare. However, there are significant variations in theserates between different countries - it is much higher, for example,in Britain - according to the vigour of state-sponsored consolida-tion schemes, the type of commodity production involved and thehistorically established forms of land tenure (far less consolidationhas been achieved in areas with small, owner-occupied farms thanin areas with large tenant-operated holdings - see 65, p. 109).None of these generalizations can, however, be made with any

degree of confidence. Rather, they are calculated guesses as to whatrural sociologists might find if they decided to engage in the com-parative, historical analysis of landholding in advanced capitalistsocieties which is so sorely needed. (A useful sourcebook of

descriptive statistics, though now outdated, is 279; the LandTenure Center, University of Wisconsin at Madison is the majorcentre of research in this field, but it concentrates overwhelminglyon less-developed countries.) It is precisely at this point, however,that the contribution of rural sociology has proved to be so lacking.Much of the debate has been ceded to agricultural economists in theguise of ’farm adjustment’ (useful compendia are 8, 12), with littlediscussion of some of the underlying assumptions upon which



49

this has been based. There seems little doubt here that this emphasisin the United States during the 1950s and 1960s was primarily afunction of the interest of the funding agencies. Rural sociology’srole was to be a handmaiden to the technological revolution in far-ming without going on to consider the social consequences of thisrevolution - the latter, arguably, being a more suitable role forsociologists.Now that the effect of this revolution upon the structure of rural

society has been perceived, the inevitable disillusion has set in (160,many of the essays collected in 301). There is, perhaps, especially inthe United States, a growing realization that ‘farm adjustment’ is aeuphemism for a fundamental change in the structure of ruralsociety which, by abstracting technological changes from the struc-ture of property relations in which they were embedded, had notbeen recognized. One unforeseen consequence, for example, mightwell have been an increase in the degree of corporate, or institu-tional landownership (see below); another is the transformation ofthe rural ’community’ (see later section). There still remains,therefore, a great need for sociological studies of how, undersimilar technological and ecological conditions, the property rela-tionships which underpin the processes of agricultural productionhave been shaped and moulded by the historical development of thesocieties within which they are located. However, there have beenfew attempts to develop either a systematic political economy ofmodern, capitalist agriculture or a comparative theory of ruralsocial structures under modern economic conditions. The contrastwith ’peasant studies’ is here quite marked.What remain are a few highly suggestive attempts at concept-

formation. There is emerging in the United States a self-consciousattempt to create a new ’sociology of agriculture’ which beginsfrom an analysis of landholding and the class structure. To a

greater or lesser extent this is influenced by Marxian class analysis(144), although an equally important concern is to support the in-terests of the fast-disappearing family farm (e.g. 284, 300) a morefamiliar ideological underpinning of rural sociology. Rodefeld, forexample, suggests that:

A sense of patterning in American agriculture is possible through consideringstructural types of farms that emerge when they are classified by simultaneouslyinvoking levels of landownership, capital ownership and labour provision bytheir managers. (300, p. 159)



50

Rodefeld then goes on to derive a fourfold typology of farm typesbased upon levels of landownership and labour provision by thefarm manager and demonstrates with the help of this typology thedeclining significance of family-sized farms in the United States, ir-respective of their level of landownership. However, as Rodefeldreadily acknowledges, an accurate assessment of these structuralchanges is hampered by the lack of previous research in this areaand even the lack of quite basic descriptive statistics:

At the same time, it need be said that to accurately assess trends in farm typesand changes in the levels and types of structural differentiation, more detailed in-formation is required in a number of areas. We need to know more about whoowns farmland and farm capital (the farm manager, labourers, nonfarmers -what type of non-farmers) who is managing farms on a daily baiss, who is doingthe farm work (managers, labourers - what type of labourers) and how much ofthe farm work are they doing. Once this information is obtained, then farmscould be classified (at the very least) by their levels of differentiation betweenland ownership, capital ownership, management and labour.Given the demonstrated trends towards larger farms with higher levels of dif-

ferentiation (lower levels of ownership and labour provision by managers) on alldimensions of organisational structure, much more empirical and conceptualwork is needed to explore the causal forces bringing these changes about and theconsequences of these changes for other farm characteristics, farm people, ruralcommunities and the urban sector. (p. 176)

Odd though it may seem to an outsider, Rodefeld is undoubtedlycorrect in hinting that rural sociology has historically neglected thedevelopment of a sociology of agriculture. Instead rural

sociologists have tended to take the system of agricultural produc-tion as a ’given’ factor in their analysis and concerned themselvesonly with understanding the ’imperfections’ of this system with aview to rectifying them (a good example of this is the study of landtenure in 30). Inevitably this has not been conducive to a holisticapproach to the sociology of landownership.

Recent trends in landownership in a number of advanced .capitalist societies has, however, led to some renewed interest inthis topic. As indicated earlier, a variety of forms of land tenure

. are, in principle, compatible with the development of a commer-cialized agriculture. The recent inflation in most Western

economies has led to a renewed interest in landownership as acapital investment on the part of various financial and/or cor-porate institutions. (It should also be noted that in some cases thishas involved direct intervention in commodity production, but this



51

is taken up in the following section; only investment in land is dealtwith here.) The intervention of these institutions has given rise tomuch speculation on whether this at last marks the emergence of themature landlord-tenant system so long predicted by many analysts.It is not possible that in the future the independent owner-occupying farmer will become instead the tenant of a pension fund,insurance company or some such similar agent of finance or

monopoly capital? Since 1970 there has been a large increase in thecorporate ownership of land in the form of purchase by financialinstitutions and non-agrucultural companies, in both Britain andthe United States (see 263, Ch. 3; 228, Ch. 6; 248, 145). The extentto which such developments will continue, however, remains uncer-tain, since the causes of this renewed institutional investment inagricultural land need not necessarily remain permanent features ofthe economy in the future.The first concerns the role of the state. In all advanced capitalist

societies the state has intervened decisively and extensively in thesystem of agricultural production (to be considered in the next sec-tion) and as such has acted as virtual guarantor of the value ofagricultural land. As Josling has pointed out in a review of

agricultural policies in the developed world:

The predominant conclusion is that land, as the input least elastic in supply gainsthe most in per unit returns, and hence in the asset price of the stock from whichland services are obtained. Though this may not hold for individual farm pro-grammes, and may be modified over time by the availability of land-savingtechnology, the impact of these conclusions has now been incorporated into theconventional wisdom of farm policies. (184, p. 247)

At the same time the state, as part of its agricultural supportpolicies, has frequently given preferential treatment to agricultureon matters relating to taxation and expenditure. This has encourag-ed corporate investment in agricultural land, both as a hedgeagainst inflation and as a ’tax break’. Thus, while the yield oncapital invested in agricultural land is generally low, capital gainscombined with tax savings can be considerable. However, the

dependency upon state action (or inaction) may create rapid fluc-tuations in the benefits to be gained. The second reason for cor-porate investment in agricultural land therefore relates to these in-stitutions themselves: they have regarded land as a secure invest-ment in terms of long-term capital growth in which they can safely



52

sink what is usually a small proportion of their funds. As a

relatively minor diversification from the traditional pattern of in-vestment by finance capital, agricultural land does not constitute asignificant part of their investment portfolios and neither do theyenvisage a dominant role in the structure of landownership. It

seems unlikely, therefore, that this trend will result in agricultureallying with other industries in establishing a wholesale separationof ownership and control. To do so would be to risk further

political intervention against institutional ownership (as in certainScandinavian countries, for example, and in California). For in thelast analysis, as we shall see in the following section, the control offood production in most advanced capitalist societies does not de-pend upon the ownership of land, while the institutions themselveshave more lucrative investment outlets, even in land, elsewhere.How, then, is this institutional investment in agricultural land to

be characterized? First, there is nothing new in this involvement:banks have long invested in farm land and so have other financialinstitutions. Secondly, while recent inflation has encouraged a

renewed surge in investment in land, the latter continues to remainan essentially peripheral activity for finance capital. While the im-pact upon the agricultural land market may be considerable it

represents little more than loose change for investment managers.Nevertheless, the impact upon farming and rural society generallyis something which is worthy of the attention of rural sociologists.The sociological consequences of these changes in landownershiphave scarcely been charted. Thirdly, following on from this, thereis a need to relate the type of landownership to its attendant im-plications for rural society. In other words, does the change frompersonal to institutional ownership make any difference to thestructure of rural society in general and the local rural communityin particular? What has in fact happened under these new formsof landownership and, in some cases, relation to the land?

Before questions like these can be satisfactorily answered, it isfirst necessary to develop a typology of landownership. Massey andCatalano (228) suggest that there are three distinct types of land-owners which ’differ from each other in terms both of the rela-tions of landownership involved, and of the role of that landowner-ship within the overall structure of the social formation’ (p .63).The first type of landownership which they identify is former land-ed property, ’that is, landownership which has been adapted to theconditions of the capitalist mode of production’ (p. 64). This type of



53

landownership is essentially a survival from the pre-capitalist erawhich has become adapted to the exigencies of capitalism. Land,for this group, involves not only an economic return but a widersocial role:

Unlike purely capitalist landowners, for this group land is the basis for other ac-tivities. They are farmers, or developers, or landlords, or timber-growers,because they own land, and not vice versa. And in order to pursue these ac-tivities, they do not in the first place have to pay a purchase price for land.(p 66)

The second type is industrial landownership, where land is ownedsimply because it is a condition of production:

The economic relation to landownership is consequently dominated by con-siderations of the relevance of particular characteristics of land to the process ofproduction. This group comprises the bulk of industrial capital, includingowner-farmers. (p. 67)

The third type is financial landownership where land is owned

simply as a sector to invest in - it is neither bound up in any othersocial role (as in former landed property) nor is it simply anecessary condition of production (as in industrial landownership).Financial landowners are concerned solely with the appreciatingcapital value of land and/or the yields (or potential yields) to begained from rental income.As far as the nature of rural social relationships are concerned, it

is apparent that these will vary considerably according to the typeof agricultural landownership that is involved. As Massey andCatalano conclude:

... the appropriation of rent as a form of surplus value, while it does convey adegree of specificity and coherence, is on its own an insufficient basis for theidentification of a distinct fraction including all the diverse groups of agents in-volved... Rent may be appropriated at a number of different points in the

overall structure of the relations of production and circulation, and there is noone role which either it or land plays in those relations. Even more, however, theclear division of bourgeois landownership into three structurally distinct groupsindicates that no one ’catch-all’ category of landed capital ... can be said to ex-ist. (p. 68)

At the very least, then, Massey and Catalano’s typology of lan-downership offers a useful heuristic device which can be used to



54

analyze not only the nature of the relationship between landholdingand the (rural) social structure but the conflicts which may occurbetween different types of landowners concerning, for example, thenature of state intervention. It would also be of interest to learn

about the distribution of landownership between these three

categories over time - although, it needs to be added, the pro-blems of data collection are often immense, given that in a numberof countries landownership remains under a shroud of secrecy andevasion (see 263, 293). Nevertheless all this suggests that there areplenty of research problems concerning landholding and the socialstructure which require further investigation. Indeed investigationhas hardly begun. But certainly the issue seems more subtle andmore complex than early sociological writings on the subject seemto suggest.

Commodity Production: The Growth of Agribusiness

In all advanced capitalist societies the major trend in farming as anoccupation can be summed up as a transition from, to use thefamiliar cliches, ’farming as a way of life’ to ’farming as a

business’. That is to say that agriculture has become increasinglyrationalized in the face of a set of market conditions, which, as weshall see, are increasingly controlled by the state. The farmer is not,however, a participant in a single market. Ruttan (305), for exam-ple, identifies five sets of market relationships which structure theagricultural economy: the product market (which may itself varyconsiderably according to the commodity involved); the purchasedinput market; the labour market; the land market; and the marketfor consumer goods (see also 23). The nature of commodity pro-duction in agriculture is therefore extremely complex and not

amenable to easy generalization. However, one condition tends todominate agricultural production in all advanced capitalistsocieties (one is tempted to state simply ’all societies’) namely theincreasing rationality of agricultural production, ’from agricultureto agribusiness’ (81).

In order to understand the underlying trends in agricultural pro-duction, rural sociologists have traditionally looked to agriculturaleconomists with whom, as we have seen, they have shared a stronginstitutional affiliation. Given the opportunities for fruitful co-

operation between the two sub-disciplines, the results have,



55

however, been disappointing. With a few exceptions rural

sociologists have appeared remarkably uninterested in the

economic factors which have changed the face of the countryside inall advanced capitalist societies since the Second World War, norhave they bothered to inquire too deeply into the admittedly in-tricate agricultural price support policies now adopted by virtuallyall governments in order to examine their social consequences. Onthe other hand, agricultural economists have been slow to providesociologists with the kind of macro-economic, institutional

analysis, or broadly-based political economy, which is most com-patible with the requirements of rural sociology. Instead

sociological variables tend to be reduced to the error factors onregression equations, while sociologists have remained unaware ofthe economic changes which have re-shaped rural society. Despiteadmonitions to the contrary (e.g. 135), the two sub-disciplines con-tinue to talk past one another.

Fortunately, the econometric revolution has not totally blightedthe work of agricultural economists and, thanks perhaps to theirpredominantly ’tied’ relationship to governments, there remains astrong tradition of policy analysis which is very relevant to the in-terests of sociologists. For it is in this context that agriculturaleconomists have been forced to confront macro-theories of socialand historical change as part of the context of the development ofparticular farm policies. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, thatpolicy analysis has revealed much less consensus among

agricultural economists than elsewhere. As Josling points out, cur-rent policy analysis, developed primarily in the United States buttaken as representative of the position in Europe or indeed any in-dustrial or semi-industrial country, ranges

... from a predominantly institutional view of society in which policy is formedby the interaction of different groups within a political and legal system, at oneextreme, and a non-institutional apolitical view at the other, in which the role ofgovernment is to correct any structural defects which might mar an otherwise’perfect’ market system. (184, p. 235)

The orthodoxy, as presented in most textbooks, is undoubtedly thelatter, however. Basically this involves a neo-classical appraisal ofagriculture as an atomistic industry in which, due to the multiplicityof enterprises, a situation of near-perfect competition previals. Itthen proceeds to emphasize the conditions of the product market



56

where a combination of supply instability, rapid technologicalchange, increases in food production and the low income-elasticityof demand for food threatens chronic over-production and/orviolent fluctuations in both production and price (see, for example,50, 181, 239). All governments in advanced industrial societies havetherefore felt it necessary to intervene in order to iron out these ’im-

perfections’ - to save farmers from the full consequences of theirown tendency to innovate and over-produce as a reaction to declin-ing returns (50).Such intervention has taken a number of forms - tariffs, defi-

ciency payments, intervention prices, direct subsidies, the forma-tion of marketing cartels, the regulation of land under cultivation- but the overall effect upon the individual farmer has been

basically similar. It has provided him with the incentive to max-imize production without suffering a commensurate fall in earn-ings. The most visible consequences of this has been the revolu-tionary changes which have occurred in the techniques of produc-tion - the introduction of tractors and combine harvesters, the im-provements in animal breeding, the calculated application of

animal feedstuffs, fertilizers and pesticides. All of these innova-tions have produced immense increases in both production andproductivity (see 98, 270) which has released labour for employ-ment elsewhere. Tinkering with the precise way in which theseschemes have operated has also enabled other desired policy objec-tives to be achieved - for example, increasing specialization, scaleof production, centralization, and so on. (For a review of thesepolicies see 181.) Although it is recognized that fluctuations and in-stability have not been entirely eliminated - the weather does,after all, remain a significant factor - they have been reduced inextent. This approach therefore emphasizes the facilitating role ofstate intervention, ’an aberration which would be absent in an idealsociety’ (184, p. 235). This is an approach which therefore beginsfrom an analysis of the conditions necessary for market

equilibrium rather than any particular social or political context.The alternative, ’institutional’ approach to policy analysis

adopts a completely different emphasis. There is an abandonmentof the perfect market model except, perhaps, as a myth whichallows some understanding of the rationality of individual farmers.Rather the exigencies of the market are regarded as the outcome ofa complex system of bargaining between various agencies of thestate, farmers’ organizations and the oligopolistic market power of



57

those companies who control the supply of farm inputs and themarketing, distribution and processing of farm outputs. Policiesare therefore derived via an overtly political bargaining processwhich takes account of such factors as the urban demand for cheapfood, the instability of unregulated markets, the influence of foodprices on inflation, the equitable earnings of farmers and others inthe food-production chain, the reliability of foreign sources of sup-ply and the use of food stocks as strategic reserves and as a weaponof foreign policy. Although some agricultural economists havefavoured such an approach (for example, Hathaway (155) in theUnited States and McCrone (231) and, with reservations, Josling(184) in Britain) the initiative for such studies has lain much morewith political scientists (e.g. 315, 370, 371). There remain, however,two glaring omissions in the literature. One is a systematic analysisof the Common Agricultural Policy within such an institutionalframework - an admittedly daunting task, but one which has ex-cited little attention, despite some work in progress on particularpolicy areas. As Josling comments,

The complex social background to European agricultural policy is treated as aninconvenient curiosity, and few economists have looked beyond the bland list of’objectives’ adumbrated in the Treaty of Rome to understand the attitudesunderlying the policy. For a set of agricultural measures which have beendiscussed as much as almost any economic policy in recent history, we are stillremarkably innocent of the real motivation. (184, p. 237)

The second omission concerns the lack of interest in trying to syn-thesize the insights of the neo-classical approach with institutionalanalysis. Not only is there a lack of synthesis, indeed, but a virtualabsence of debate or even mutual understanding. Consequently nosustained political economy (in a literal as well as a Marxist sense)has emerged from agricultural economics on which a sociology ofagriculture can be founded (see also the comments in 54).A rare glimpse of the exponents of these two approaches engaged

in debate is provided by the instructive exchange in the AmericanJournal of Agricultural Economics which followed the publicationof Lianos and Paris’s paper on ’American Agriculture and the Pro-phecy of Increasing Misery’ (211). The authors attempt to ex-

emplify Marx’s immiseration thesis by investigating the decliningincome share of workers in American agriculture since the SecondWorld War, as well as accounting for rapid technological change



58

and increasing concentration over the same period in terms of thetendency towards a falling rate of profit. Their conclusion is thatthe rate of exploitation (including self-exploitation) is increasing.However, they foreshadow the objections which their analysismight raise at the end of their paper:

The neo-classical framework is essentially a theory of resource allocation. Thebehaviour of the relative share of labour is explained by the market mechanism,and it is viewed as a result of that mechanism under the assumption of profitmaximisation which implies tendency for equality between marginal product oflabour and wage rate. In this framework labour exploitation arises as a problemof disequilibrium and no ethical judgement is expressed. On the other hand, theMarxian framework explains the behaviour of the relative share of labour interms of economic conflicts between capitalists and labourers and views (andpredicts) its decline as a result of increasing exploitation of labour based on thesuperior bargaining position of capital owners.

In both theories changes in the capital-labour (capital-wage bill) ratio are ofkey importance in explaining changes in the relative share of labour, and in boththeories the capital-labour ratio changes with the adoption of technologicalchange.The most important differences between the two theories is, of course, the inter-

pretation of the term exploitation and the resulting social philosophies and predic-tions about economic and social change. (p. 576)

The subsequent exchanges did indeed demonstrate a clash of ’socialphilosophies’ although, given the very overt state intervention inagriculture and the generally accepted observation of the movetowards agribusiness, there was some degree of convergence bet-ween the two approaches. As Schluter (310, p. 158) put it, ’Lianosand Paris have rediscovered the cost-price squeeze and renamed it!’

There is some basis to Schulter’s remark, for although the dif-ferent vocabulary reflects those differing ’social philosophies’,both neo-classical and institutional (Marxist or non-Marxist)economists recognize that for better or for worse the main

regulator of returns in most branches of agriculture has become thestate. In all of these societies farmers have been placed by the stateunder a cost-price squeeze - that is, the state has ensured thatfarmers have not quite been reimbursed for their rise in costs inorder to provoke a further round of technological innovation.Farmers and their representatives have thus found themselvesbargaining directly with the state in order to maintain or enhancetheir economic position. Conversely the state has been able to

shape and mould the kind of agriculture which it would prefer by



59

tinkering with the support system. There is a desperate need for acomparative analysis of such state intervention which takes accountof the sociological underpinnings of the varying forms of politicalmobilization among farmers and their success in hindering or ac-celerating the predominant trend towards agribusiness. Despite thenumber of comparative studies of peasant political movements(e.g. 202, 375) there remains a dearth of studies which investigatepolitical movements among commercial farmers on a comparativebasis (the best summary is 146, Ch. 1, which is a summary ofresearch on farmers’ organizations in the United States, Canada,Great Britain and Australia; a compendium which includes

employees’ organizations is 110).Instead of investigating the causes of state intervention in

agriculture, rural sociologists have, then, been traditionally con-cerned with the consequences. There has been a long history, par-ticularly in the United States, of rural sociologists documentingthe results of agricultural policies in terms of demographic change,migration, rural poverty, the changing rural community and otherassociated problems of ’farm adjustment’. The self-assigned role ofrural sociologists has been, in many cases, to act as the midwives ofstate agricultural policy, either by contributing to an understandingof ’maladjustments’ (as in much of the literature on the diffusionof innovations) or by attempting to humanize policy decisions (bytugging at the conscience of policy-makers on such matters as ruraldepopulation or rural poverty). Rural sociologists have not,however, developed a critical stance towards these policies in thefirst place. Only very recently, in the wake of Hightower’s attack,has a critique begun to emerge in the United States (e.g. 237, 301)while it is virtually absent in Britain and much of Europe, where thetrend towards agribusiness is regarded as natural and inevitable, ifnot desirable.

, Nevertheless the sheer documentation of descriptive social trends

i by rural sociologists has enabled a clear view to be obtained of theI move towards state-sponsored agribusiness and what this entailsI for the structure of rural society. The most obvious consequence,

already commented upon, has been the wholesale substitution ofcapital for labour. As a result productivity per man in agriculture inthe most technologically advanced countries like the United Statesand Britain now exceeds that in the other sectors of the economy.The demand for full-time agricultural labour has fallen con-

siderably in all advanced capitalist societies (269) and will un-



60

doubtedly continue to do so. However the quantitative reduction inthe labour force is producing qualitative changes in its structure.Farmers, who are the least mobile component of the labour force,constitute an increasing proportion of it and there has been a

gradual replacement of male, full-time hired workers by female,part-time and casual workers. The pattern now reasonably well-established in the United States seems likely to become more

universal: on the one hand a reduction of permanent hired labourso that there emerges a predominance of family farms with casualor contract labour hired to cover the peaks of labour demand; andon the other the gradual reduction of the number of family farmsthrough amalgamation and the emergence of large corporate farm-ing agglomerations.

This slow polarization of the farm structure produces contradic-tory tendencies in the structure of the farm enterprise which tend tobe masked by the overall trend. While the smaller farms shedlabour and revert to family farms, extremely large units are also be-ing formed which employ considerable amounts of hired abour.The overall downward trend in the use of hired labour tends to hidethis changing internal polarization of structure. Agriculturaleconomists still remain agnostic on the relationship between sizeand efficiency in agriculture and in which direction, if any, thecausal connection runs (see 39, 294, 265). Rural sociologists, inturn, have been slow to investigate the social impact in the coun-tryside of the slow trend towards this polarized structure. AsKrause and Kyle (195) indicate in their paper on large-scale farmingin the United States, while much concern has been expressed aboutthe impact of urbanization and industrialization on rural life,’research on the impact of large farms on communities and tradeareas is rather meagre’ (p. 757). Undoubtedly family farms willcontinue to predominate numerically for the foreseeable future,especially in those branches of agriculture where there are feweconomies of scale obtainable beyond a size of enterprise stillwithin the reach of the family farm (e.g. dairying, sheep farming).In addition family-operated farms are not necessarily incompatiblewith technological advance. As Nikolitch has pointed out:

Family farms are most numerous where the mechanisation of the farm produc-tion is at least as well developed as in any other part of the United States. This in-dicates their compatibility with this kind of technological advance. (265, p. 533)



61

However, in terms of the concentration of production there is apersistent and definite shift in the direction of the large-scale units.By the end of the 1980s it has been estimated that 92 percent of thefarm output in the United States will take place on just 10 percentof the holdings and a degree of concentration approaching this isalso conceivable in Britain and other technologically advancedagricultural nations.The reasons for this shift lie less in the incompatibility of family

farms with the technology of production, than in their ability to ac-cumulate capital at a sufficient rate to take advantage of the newtechnological innovations necessary to retain price-competitiveness(120). In part smaller farmers have coped with this problem bybecoming increasingly specialized (133, 203), thus limiting theirspread of capital investment and making the fullest use of the

capital available. Such a trend has also been aided by improvedtransportation and marketing techniques. However, specializationhas also been accompanied by the concentration of productionamong the largest enterprises which can claim economies of scaleand withstand periods of adverse market conditions. Such

specialization has also increased the division of labour within

agriculture and rendered farms (and farmers) less autonomous asproductive units. Farms have become more dependent upon inputssupplied from outside and farmers, as formerly independent en-trepreneurs have become subject to a progressive erosion of theirindependence as a result (see 263). Agriculture has become increas-ingly drawn into a food-producing complex whose limits lie wellbeyond farming itself, a complex of agro-chemical, engineering,processing, marketing and distribution industries which are involv-ed both in the supply of farming inputs and in the forward

marketing of farm produce. Indeed, as Larson and Rogers (203)comment: ’... the increasing dependence of farmers upon

agribusiness is one index of the trend from subsistence farming tomodern agriculture’. (p. 49)This food-producing complex has hardly been explored by either

agricultural economists or rural sociologists, although it is ap-parent, as far as the latter are concerned, that this would take theanalysis far beyond what is customarily understood as ’rural’.

Nevertheless, on the supply side it is clear that farmers increasinglypurchase machinery, fertilizers, feedstuffs, seed, pesticides,petroleum products and, not least, credit from national, or evenmulti-national organizations against whom they are in a very weak



62

bargaining position. Similarly farmers sell much of their produce towholesalers, processors and distributors who are also national ormulti-national combines (in some cases, the same as those fromwhich they purchase their inputs). In many cases this has been ac-companied by the displacement of various food-production pro-cesses to off-farm enterprises and the trend towards more process-ed and packaged ’convenience’ foods is in part a cause and in part aconsequence of this. Thus the proportion of the population engag-ed in food-production has not declined to the same extent as thoseengaged in farming, but since the value added from processingfood is much greater than that of producing it there have been

significant effects upon the transfer of resources out of the rural,agricultural sector and the terms of trade between the farm andnon-farm sectors. All these factors have contributed to giving thespiral of increased capitalization, specialization and concentrationof production an extra twist and threatened to reduce the enter-preneurial and managerial autonomy of farmers to the extent thatthey become ’farm operators’ or ’farm minders’.We still know very little about how far farmers perceive these

trends and how they evaluate them. It is clear, however, that if thestate has acted as one major sponsor of structural change in

agriculture (and therefore in rural society) the multi-national andother large-scale corporations which constitute this food-producingcomplex are another. And it is also clear that we know next to

nothing about the links between these corporations and the for-mulation of these state policies beyond some anecdotal evidenceconcerning the two-way flow of top personnel (160) and the tailor-ing of certain specific policies to meet their needs (75). Yet it is

here, in the actions of the state or the food-processing con-glomerates like Unilever, Ralston Purina, Cargill, Cavenham,Rank-Hovis-MacDougall, Nestle, Associated British Foods,General Foods, Tenneco and many more, that the shape of

agriculture and ultimately of rural society in virtually all advancedindustrial societies is decided. It is extraordinary that these issueshave been studied so little by sociologists.The most visible and direct form of intervention by the food-

producing complex takes the form of vertical integration, perhapsthe most common form of control in the United States and in largeparts of the Third World. Here particular companies may controlthe entire operation from ihe provision of seeds to the fast-foodoutlet (273). Complete vertical integration results in the loss of the



63

farmer’s independence entirely and the ’farmer’ now becomes thefield manager for a food-processing firm. Nevertheless rates of ver-tical integration vary quite considerably between different com-modities and between different societies at the same level of

technological development, so broader social and historical factorsseem to play a part in accounting for the uneven growth of verticalintegration (see 247). Farmers have, for example, found variousmeans of resisting the looming market power of the food-

producing complex, either through the efforts of their own pressuregroups or under the benevolent patronage of the state. Farmers

organizations are deployed to circumvent not only the cost-pricesqueeze implemented by the state but the oligarchic or monopolistictendencies of suppliers and buyers. They may do so by creatingtheir own producer-controlled cartels - such as the marketingboards found in Britain (357) - or by encouraging the growth ofco-operatives, which are often sponsored by the state as a means ofsupporting small-scale producers and trying to ensure the continu-ing vitality of those rural areas where they are concentrated (see190). Comparative studies of these varying responses to the tenden-cy towards concentration and integration would be most valuable.

In most advanced industrial societies, however, the most com-mon relationship between farmers and the food-producing complexis some form of contract farming, whereby farmers by-pass thestate apparatus for determining the price of farm produce andnegotiate contracts directly with processed-food manufacturers orwholesalers. Farmers organizations may intervene in this processby attempting to institute some form of collective bargaining overcontracts and safeguard the interests of their members, but thereare perceived advantages for both sides in this arrangement. Thefarmer is provided with a guaranteed market (and price) for hisproduce, thus reducing the burden of risk. He is also able to ob-tain easier access to credit, technical advice and marketing exper-tise. The processor, on the other hand, can ensure continuity andquality of supply, can share some of the risk involved in productionand by avoiding direct production of crops and animals circumventsthe politically sensitive area of landownership and does not have tosink capital in agricultural land which provides a low rate of return(295). However, the farmer will almost certainly cede some of hisautonomy over husbandry and runs the risk of increasingdependence upon a large and remote industrial corporation.Contract farming has also been responsible for changing the



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structure of agricultural production in certain commodities - withfar-reaching consequences for rural society. In the United States,for example:

Contract production is used by large-scale units to increase market price or pro-duct revenue over several production years. Middleman handlers can be

eliminated; and production, handling, and processing of products can be

prescheduled for greater overall efficiency.The gradual industrialisation of production is being forced by industrialisation

of the processing, handling, and distribution of food. Production units that arelarge enough to ’fit the system’ participate in the profits generated. (195, p. 753)

In some types of farms, obtaining inputs, marketing, and processing havebecome so closely related to production that their organisation is being read-justed to best co-ordinate these functions. Supplying units, marketing and pro-cessing are stages of agricultural production more adapted to a concentration ofcapital, management, and labour than crop growing and animal production. Asa result these farms tend to develop into larger business sizes, and the patterns oforganisation found in non-farm industries are becoming more prevalent. (265,p. 533)

This pattern has been repeated in Europe:

These contractual arrangements...accentuate the problems of agricultural ad-justment. For example, the adoption of new technology is hastened, accen-

tuating the pressure on supplies; this is especially likely if contracts are accom-panied by significant credit extension, which facilitates the adoption of the mosttechnically efficient production methods. The resulting increases in supply leadto downward pressure on prices and possibly lower incomes for non-contractingfarmers. These arrangements also lead to fundamental changes in farm struc-ture. They encourage both fewer, larger holdings and increased specialisation sothat the size of individual enterprises can be enlarged to fully achieve the prevail-ing scale economies. This trend... is likely to lead to both a reduction in thenumbers employed in agriculture, and a decline in the managerial role of thosefarmers remaining...leaving them caretaker functions. (239, p. 104)

Over fifty years ago Kautsky, in rather more colourful language,made much the same point:

Agroindustries are subject to the law of concentration and centralisation, to

scale economies and the law on increasing farm size (c.f. the example of Nestle),like other industries. Where this industrialisation of agriculture does not entirelyeliminate the smallholder, it bind:; him to the monopsonist power of the factoryand converts him into a serf of industrial capital, working to its requirements.The domination of agriculture by industry which these examples signify is car-

ried further, finally, by the more efficient utilisation of new materials, includingthe recycling of waste products, and by the production of synthetic substitutes



65

(margarine, artificial cheese) which compete directly with the natural pro-ducts...We cannot say that agriculture has been ruined under these pressures. But its

conservative character has gone forever wherever the modern mode of produc-tion has taken root. The entire economic life of the countryside which revolvedeternally in the same orbits has today fallen into a state of perpetual revolutionwhich is a necessary feature of capitalism. (14, pp. 44-45)

Most of these trends are by now well documented by agriculturaleconomists, but their sociological consequences remain under-

examined. It is true that sociologists have noted the increased rural-urban interaction that has resulted from the growing incorporationof agriculture - an awareness which has, for example, provokedthe unease with the conceptual category of ’rural sociology’.However, the consequences of these trends in terms of the con-sciousness of the farmers themselves, their political mobilization,the ’industrial relations’ of agriculture, demographic change, theprovision of rural services and, perhaps most importantly, thechanging configuration of property relationships all requiresubstantial further investigation.How then, will the small farmer survive in the face of all these

trends? To some extent as was indicated earlier, the tenacity of thesmall farmer is a product of his willingness to accept lower rewardsthan his capital could earn elsewhere and often he is prepared to doso in order to retain his ’independence’ (see 264). The very fact thatmigration is the only alternative in many remote areas of familyfarming is also a strong disincentive to leave agriculture (see 40,128, 134, 174, 290). In addition, the small farmer is often a part-time farmer obtaining a second income from non-agriculturalemployment (28, 115, 134). It is apparent, however, that by nomeans all types of farming benefit equally from economies of scale.Family farming may be aided by mechanization in some cases, sothat small farms will continue to co-exist alongside the larger unitsfor the foreseeable future, perhaps by withdrawing from directcompetition with them. Small farms may still prosper by astutespecialization in areas of production which larger enterprises can-not be bothered with - specialized forms of horticulture, marketgardening, nurseries, etc. - and/or by taking advantage of localmarket opportunities and soil conditions. As Nikolitch points out:

The biological nature and the spatial dispersion of farm production may belargely responsible, for they make a large concentration of capital, management,



66

and labour more difficult in farming than in other industries. Thus, competitiveefficiency (least-cost production) is attained in farming at a smaller firm sizethan in many other kinds of production, and these smaller sizes in turn are beingadapted to the managerial and working capacities of self-employed familylabour.As yet, no technological breakthrough has significantly eliminated the con-

siderable influence of biological and spatial characteristics on the organisation offarm production. Farms remain mostly family-operated, family-owned, andrelatively small businesses. (265, p. 544)

Nevertheless as the movement towards increasing concentrationand incorporation into the non-farm food-processing complex con-tinues, the small farmer is likely to find himself under persistenteconomic pressure, especially now that food surpluses are oncemore an endemic feature of world markets and that politicalpressure is once again being applied to accelerate the decrease in thenumber of small, ’inefficient’ producers. A renewed concernamong rural sociologists for the plight of the small, family farmeris now apparent in the United States (see, e.g., 301), where some ofthe deleterious social effects of farm concentration are now beingrecognized and monitored. A new ’sociology of agriculture’ is

emerging there as a form of ’academic populism’ with echoes ofthose Jeffersonian values which have influenced rural sociology inthe past. Whatever its ideological basis, this development is certain-ly encouraging. A new sociology of agriculture is required both tounderstand the causes of the changing structure of food productionand to consider the consequences of this changing structure interms of its impact upon rural society more generally.

Labour Relations in Agriculture

Given the general trend towards a more economically rationalorganization of agricultural production, it would be tempting toassume that relationships between employers and employees in

agriculture are being rationalized along similar lines to those inother industries. Raup for example, asks whether alienation willemerge as a problem in corporate farming:

It is difficult for a worker in a textile mill, a steel mill, an oil refinery, or anairline to imagine himself the owner of the capital with which he works. Thisidentification is much more plausible in agriculture. A corporate farm structurein the last quarter of the twentieth century must struggle with the alienationquestion. (295, p. 289)



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In the United States there has been a limited exploration of thisissue in some scattered local studies. Rushing (304), for example,has investigated the composition of the rural class structure in thestate of Washington in these terms and Martinson et al. (226) havereported on a study of powerlessness and social isolation amonglarge-scale farm personnel in Wisconsin. As the latter conclude:

... it seems appropriate to say that, at least for Wisconsin, large-scale farm per-sonnel, one’s occupation makqs a difference in feeling alienated from power andin feeling alienated from other people... What seems apparent... is that thework experience will produce differences in feelings of alienation among thefarm personnel which may not go away as agriculture becomes more industrialis-ed. The dominating influences of a differentiated structure of production willremain and will continue to have an effect on the subjectively experienced well-being of large-scale farm personnel. (p. 468)

While this is undoubtedly correct as far as it goes, the implicit pro-position that labour relations in agriculture are destined to becomemore like those prevalent in manufacture, as farming itself

becomes more ’industrialized’, needs to be treated with extremecaution. There is no necessary one-to-one correspondence betweentechnological development in agriculture and any particular systemof labour relations - as a brief reflection on the differences bet-

ween North American and Western European agriculture will in-dicate. Nor is there any correspondence between the developmentof labour relations in agriculture and in industry except, perhaps,in the broadest possible terms. It is true that in all advanced

capitalist societies the agricultural worker has been converted into awage labourer whose market situation is similar to that of the in-dustrial worker and that, as elsewhere, there has been a tendency tostrip the nexus between employer and employee down to a contrac-tual one involving a wage payment. However, the social relationswhich overlay this market situation have by no means exhibited thetendencies apparent in industry, owing to the peculiarities of theconditions of agricultural production. Indeed the development ofan ’industrialized’ agriculture is compatible with a very wide varie-ty of social relations (14, 79, 151, 229).

This very diversity in the social relations of agricultural produc-tion renders all but the most trivial generalizations extremely dif-ficult. In recent years there has been, for example, a growingrealization that even peasant agriculture is by no means incompati-ble with an ’industrialized’ system of food production under cer-



68

tain conditions (see 215). In addition, there is the further problemof the dearth of rural sociological studies on hired farm workers tocontend with. While specific groups of workers have recentlyreceived considerable attention - for example, migrant workers inthe United States - no systematic, comparative study of farmworkers is available and in many advanced industrial societies theirsocial situation remains entirely unexplored. These considerationsmake the summary offered in this section tentative in the extreme.What follows is not so much an overview of research but a few

guestimates of what researchers might find if they cared to look.Whatever the differences between industrial manufacture and

agriculture, there seems little doubt that the revolution which hasoccurred in the techniques of agricultural production have had aprofound effect upon the relationships between farmers (which, forthe purposes of this section only, might be taken to include owner-occupiers, tenants and managers) and farm workers. One of thefew facts that we do know about farm workers is that the

mechanization of agriculture has drastically reduced the number ofworkers required in absolute terms, releasing farm workers to othersectors of the economy and, in many cases, encouraging a migra-tion of the rural population to the towns. Mechanization - and theassociated substitute of labour by capital - has also affected thenature of the work itself, the social relationships among workersand the relationships between workers and their employers in thework situation (260). However, the impact of mechanization onagricultural work has been, with some exceptions considered

below, almost the reverse of that in industry. Mechanization has,for example, decreased rather than increased the division of labouramong agricultural workers and has done so without reducing theautonomy, discretion or variety which most full-time hired workersexperience in their jobs. In part, this is because of the different fac-tor mix in agriculture compared with industry. Whilst land remainsan important factor of production in agriculture - which it does inmost, but by no means all, branches of the industry-..it remains im-possible to control the conditions of production in a way which willfundamentally revolutionize the productive process. In industrymechanization allowed the productive process to be broken downinto a number of stages which were carried out concurrently; inagriculture, however, the continuing importance of land andseasonal conditions means that production, even after mechaniza-tion, must be carried out sequentially. Thus mechanization hastransformed the pace of work on the land, but left its rhythm large-



69

ly unaltered (38). Moreover it has enabled the machine to remainthe servant of the worker rather than vice versa and in so doingremoved much of the routine drudgery and physically arduous andexhausting labour from agriculture.

This trend has not, of course, been universal. Those branches of

agriculture where land is of less importance and/or which have pro-ved amenable to the artificial control of climatic and other essentialenvironmental factors have been able to initiate concurrent formsof production more akin to industrial manufacture. Significantlythese are colloquially termed ’factory farms’. They are most com-mon in certain types of intensive livestock and horticultural pro-duction, which can take place either indoors or under glass,although where natural conditions permit, these conditions can beinstituted out of doors too - as in, say, parts of California. Onthese ’factory farms’ productive processes have been altered in sucha way as to render them almost identical to those in manufactur-

ing industry, including extensive automation and assembly-lineproduction in some cases. Indeed in many instances ’factory farm-ing’ has been instituted, or at least encouraged, by the vertical in-tegration or contract farming arrangements of food processors(72). Although it seems reasonable to assume that the work situa- _

tion on these farms resembles that in many factories, we know littleabout the conditions of work nor the attitudes and behaviour ofthese workers - many of whom, it is worth pointing out, arefemale. Nevertheless, the tendency towards ’factory farming’seems, prima facie at least, to illustrate the trend towards alienationpresaged by Raup and by Martinson et al.An additional example of the growth of an alienated workforce

in agriculture concerns the employment of casual or migrantworkers in the harvesting of fruit and vegetables. Particualr atten-tion has been paid to the plight of migrant farm workers in theUnited States, where following the famous CBS Sixty Minutesreport by Ed Murrow on migrant workers, ’Harvest of Shame’(1960), the conditions of migrant workers and their struggle forunionization became a national political issue. Until Cesar Chavezattracted radical chic support, however, the migrant workers wereconveniently ignored by the rest of the populace and, with a fewhonourable exceptions (e.g. 234, 335), remained beyond the in-terest of most writers on rural affairs. Rural sociology’s record onthis issue has not, until very recently, been a particularly encourag-ing one. For all the attention paid to poor farmers in the United



70

States, particularly in the 1930s, rural sociologists overlooked theplight of migrant workers until it was placed in front of them byChavez. In Baker’s apt phrase they remained ’the invisible workers’(11). To some degree this oversight has now been rectified, thoughsince the history of the migrant workers encompasses such issues asthe struggle between capital and labour, racial discrimination,minority oppression, poverty and social injustice, the focus of therelevant studies is equally wide-ranging (see, for example, 230, 121,288, 122, 306, 345, 377). Contributions by professional sociologistscontinue to be somewhat sporadic (e.g. 304, 178, 118, 119), butthere is now a much greater awareness of the peculiar problems ofmigrant workers and their families.Almost all of the writers on migrant farm workers agree that

these peculiar problems relate to the cruel conjuncture of structuralfactors which render them virtually powerless. Jenkins and Perrowsummarize these factors as follows:

There are few barriers of habit or skill that restrict the entry of any applicant towork in the fields. The result is an ’unstructured’ labour market, offering littlejob stability and open to all comers. The fields of California and Texas are closeenough to the poverty-stricken provinces of Mexico to insure a steady influx ofworkers, many of whom arrive by illegal routes. Continuous immigration notonly underwrites the oversupply of labour, but complicates mobilisation by in-suring the existence of cultural cleavages among workers.

Furthermore...the majority of farm workers, both domestic and alien, areshort-term seasonal workers. During the early 1960s, farm employment in

California averaged less than three months of the year... And for the vast ma-jority of farm workers, regardless of job commitment or citizenship status, in-come is so low as to leave little economic reserve for risk-taking. Since a majorportion of the year’s income comes during the brief harvest period, workers arereluctant to risk their livelihood on a strike at that time.

In addition to these structural restraints on collective action, there were thevery direct restraints of the growers and their political allies. The CaliforniaDepartment of Employment and the U.S. Department of Labour have longoperated farm placement services that furnish workers for strike-bound

employers. Insurgent actions that directly threaten growers, like picket lines andmass rallies, consistently have been the target of official harassment. (178,pp. 251-252)

In the background there has always lain the highly vertically-integrated American food-producing complex, a multi-billiondollar industry with the political and economic power to preventthe growth of a powerful union organization. Indeed some of theunknown factors in assessing the life-chances of the migrant



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worker concern the reasons why American agri-business chooses toorganize itself in this manner (the contrast with Europe is quitestriking) and whether the ability of the workers to organize merelyprecipitates a further round of mechanization and shedding oflabour. Despite the enormous gains made by Chavez in the face ofoverwhelming odds, much of the powerlessness remains. As Bakersums it up:

Unlike an auto plant or similar factory there are no gates or parking lots whereworkers can congregate. The factories, in this case, are wide fields that spillacross the horizon, out of sight and sound. Many employees live in grower-owned labour camps that are off-limits to union organisers. It is like trying toorganise a factory whose location changes every day and whose workers changenearly as often. ( 11, p. 154)

There might be some interesting insights to be gained by comparingthe plight of the migrant farm worker in the United States with thesituation of farm workers in other agricultural systems at a similarstage of technological development in order to understand the fac-tors which account for the presence or absence of labour market

power. Perhaps the most startling example of migrant farmworkers successfully organizing themselves and, indeed, being inthe vanguard of the labour movement is in Australia, where thesheep-shearers have developed a high degree of union solidarityand exhibit a well-defined political awareness not common

elsewhere (see 146, Ch. 1). This demonstrates that there is no in-evitability attached to the political powerlessness of migrant farmworkers, though the precise nature of the conditions under whichsuccessful mobilization is possible remains a matter for furtherresearch (for suggestions see 178).Some of these potentialities become more apparent when the

situation of the permanent, hired labour force is considered. For

example, Sufrin, in his somewhat overlooked paper on Americanagricultural labour organization, regards migrant workers as beingmore amenable to organization - thanks to racial homogeneity,gang labour methods, common living conditions and commonsupervision - than the ’hired hands’ (335). The technologicalchanges which have occurred in agriculture have certainly served toisolate the permanent hired agricultural worker, both from hisfellow workers and from the public at large. These workers nolonger work together in groups as much as they used to, except



72

where plantation agriculture prevails and even there mechanizationhas made substantial inroads into the demand for gang labour (e.g.on cotton plantations). Most permanent farm workers today workin considerable isolation on board a tractor or combine harvester.

They are mostly scattered in ones and twos across the length andbreadth of the countryside and in the aftermath of the attentionpaid to migrant workers it is perhaps they who more deserve thesobriquet of ’invisible workers’. Apart from studies of their oc-cupational mobility (e.g. 31) they are certainly invisible to mostrural sociologists who have consistently ignored their presence inrural society. Nevertheless an examination of their social situationis not without interest, particularly as it illustrates the caution withwhich theories of workers’ attitudes and behaviour developed instudies of the manufacturing labour force need to be treated whenapplied to agriculture.The impact of mechanization on the job content and job satisfac-

tion of the permanent labour force has already been noted.

However, the sheer decline in numbers as well as the changingorganization of farm work which have been wrought bymechanization are likely to have had a considerable effect also onthe social structure of the farm and, indeed, the local social struc-ture of the countryside (to be considered in the following section).For example, any collectivist impulse which may have emergedfrom the frequent and pervasive contact between workers on theland may have become more attenuated (260). Furthermore thecontinuing outflow of labour from agriculture, often accompaniedby rural depopulation (see 308) has undermined the solidarities ofwhatever rural working-class sub-culture existed in rural areas in anera when labour was more numerous on the land (22, 257). Thuswhile in the past agricultural workers often developed a strong, ifcovert, sense of group identity based upon their shared experiencewith neighbours and workmates (see, for example, 104, 105, 106,169, and the comparative material in 176) it seems likely that thiswill have declined - although it has not yet entirely disappeared -and will continue to do so in the future (304, 257, 260, 54). To theextent that the agricultural worker remains ’hidden from history’,the parameters of these changes still need to be explored, especiallyon a comparative basis.

Relationships between farm workers and their employers havealso been affected by these changes. Perhaps the most importantconcerns the debureaucratization of farms that has been a conse-



73

quence of the diminution of the labour force. In the past theemployer was a remote and authoritarian figure in the labour-intensive branches of agriculture, but mechanization, havingdrastically reduced the number of workers, has also simplified theauthority structure and, except on the very largest farms, most ofthe intermediary levels of authority between employer and

employee have been removed. Consequently the relationship bet-ween farmers and their workers is more personal and more infor-mal, without reference to a prescribed code of rules and regula-tions. There may, as a result, have been a reduction in the socialdistance between farmers and farm workers, with employers in-creasingly able to obtain the personal identification of their

employees where in the past this was withheld (258). However,these generalizations must remain wholly speculative in the absenceof further research on the social situation of farm workers inmodern agriculture. Certainly they take no account of the macro-social context of agricultural change, such as the general reductionof rural-urban cultural differences and the changing social comp-osition of rural society (see below) which have been equally influen-tial.

Nevertheless if these speculations contain any validity, then thegeneral trend of labour relations on the farm has been the reverseof that in industry. Capitalist development in agriculture has notproduced, in general, large concentrations of labour, a growth ofbureaucracy, or a distant and more authoritarian managerial style- on the contrary. Neither have the potentialities of collective ac-tion through agricultural trade unionism markedly improved as aresult. Although the farm worker has become less isolated in acultural sense - less limited in his access to knowledge about theworld beyond the farm gate and with expectations and aspirationsno longer noticeably dissimilar to those of the rest of the workingpopulation - there are fewer opportunities to sustain theanimosities of rural class conflict which arose from the old socialstructure. Permanently hired farm workers today tend to be moreisolated from each other, brought into a greater degree of face-to-face contact with their employers and less inclined to regard theirrelationship with farmers as oppositional in consequence - or atleast so one must assume in the absence of any real evidence to thecontrary. Where large concentrations of workers remain in order toprovide a basis for organization and collective action they are morelikely to be migrant or casual workers and hence encumbered with



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an additional range of difficulties (119). In general, then, it seems

that recent changes in the social structure of agriculture have notbeen of the kind which might allow agricultureal workers to

dramatically alter their generally exploited situation through theirown collective action.The structure of labour relations within agriculture therefore ap-

pear to exhibit a tendency towards, in Weberian terms, tradi-tionalism - that is, relationships are becoming more particularisticand diffuse. This may seem paradoxical, for rural sociologists havecustomarily devoted a great deal of effort to charting thebreakdown of tradition in rural society, beginning with the work ofTonnies and running through to the countless community studieswhich have emphasized the passing of Gemeinschaft. Indeed it isparadoxical that within a context of technological transformation,the move towards agribusiness and the increasing rationalization ofproductive activity we find the re-creation of ’traditional’ struc-tures of class relationships within agriculture. This re-creation oftraditionalism on the farm is, of course, rendered possible by thedisplacement of the food-producing labour force into off-farm ac-tivities, but nevertheless the paradox remains. It has been overlook-ed by rural sociologists, partly because they have adopted a rathernarrow, descriptive version of traditionalism (150), and partlybecause of their near-exclusive focus on community change and thegrowth of an entrepreneurial rationality among farmers. To thisparadox we may add another: it has long been the practice ofsociologists in general (though less so of rural sociologists) to

regard the rural sector of advanced industrial societies as

’backward’ or ’traditional’ in contrast with the ’modern’

characteristics of urban society. Yet in most advanced industrialsocieties it was agriculture which first became ’modernized’ (246)and exhibited the impersonal, instrumental class-based relation-ships later regarded as the hallmark of urbanism. Now, however,the class structure of agriculture is reverting to a traditional struc-ture where ’everyone knows everyone else’ on the farm and whereclass relationships are mediated via a personalized, particularisticstructure.

Within these paradoxes there lie some fruitful areas for research,to say nothing of the opportunities for de-bunking some of thelooser generalizations concerning ’the theory of industrial society’(c.f. 139). For example, if the class structure of agriculture is

becoming more ’traditional’ is this true also for the content of these



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relationships? Although once again the absence of any systematiccomparative research hinders safe generalization, there is some

evidence to show that where a hierarchical and largely ascriptivesystem of rural stratification is combined with a highly par-ticularistic structure of relationships then a system of traditionalauthority tends to ensue no matter how rational or ’modern’ theeconomic activity of the dominant class may be (see, for example,176, 136, 137, 314). Patriarchalism or paternalist capitalism seemsto flourish under these conditions (259). The growing particularismof the social structure in agriculture has enabled such paternalismto become a viable means of stabilizing the rural social hierarchyand maintaining the identification of the farm worker should thosein power wish to avail themselves of the opportunity (see 263).There lies, however, a possible source of contradiction between theincreasing ’traditionalism’ of the farm structure and the ’moderniz-ing’ influences at work in rural society generally which may find ex-pression in a variety of ways (see 202, 178).

If we are to search for the sources of declining traditional

authority in rural society they lie not so much in the changing socialstructure of agriculture as in the changing values of rural

employers. It is doubtful whether any generalized notion of patriar-chal traditional authority is anything like so ingrained amongfarmers and landowners in advanced capitalist societies as it oncewas. Tradition and the cult of gentlemanly values have been over-taken by technical expertise, specialized knowledge, business effi-ciency and professionalism. Thus while wholesale mechanizationand the consequent outflow of labour from agriculture have pro-duced conditions more favourable for the maintenance of tradi-tional authority and allowed the employer to gain the identificationof his workers more easily than in the past, farmers are increasinglyinclined to adopt a rational ethic of professionalism and abjure thetraditional social obligations attaching to their position. To theyounger generation of farmers and landowners these obligationsmay appear tiresome, anachronistic and even faintly embarrassing.Caught up in these general changes - possibly more so than theirworkers - farmers may be inclined to treat their employees in amore impersonal and instrumental manner more akin to the prac-tice of contemporary industrial employers.

It is therefore apparent that there are conflicting tendencies atwork in modern agriculture which are pulling both the structureand content of labour relations in different directions simultaneous-



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ly. For this reason it is difficult to predict the outcome of thesetendencies, particularly when, as we have noted, the present struc-tures themselves are so varied. Much will depend upon the futurerates of labour outflow, farm amalgamation, vertical integration,capital investment and change in farm support policies. The presentperiod marks something of a crossroads in the trends apparenthitherto in all or most of these factors. Most advanced capitalistsocieties exhibit an ageing agricultural labour force, so that the nextdecade or so should witness further widespread changes. It shouldproduce a definitive test of Kautsky’s prediction that

... the modern mode of production thus returns, at the end of its dialectical pro-cess to the original point of departure, to a suppression of the separation of in-dustry and agriculture. (14, p. 47)

5

COMMUNITY CHANGE IN RURAL AREAS

Earlier in this report we have already noted the importance of Ton-nies as a ’founding father’ of rural sociology. Since Tonnies may besaid to have a similar status in the field of community studies (21,Ch. 2) it is not surprising that community studies have long been acentral concern of rural sociologists, nor that they should havebeen conducted largely within a conceptual framework of

gemeinschaft-gesellschaft. Beginning with Galpin’s pioneeringSocial Anatomy of an Agricultural Community (1915) rural

sociologists have conducted literally thousands of communitystudies and in many cases have been encouraged to do so by fun-ding agencies, particularly in the United States (271). Moreovercommunity studies have long been the province of social an-

thropologists and social historians so that we find in the area ofrural community studies one of the most widespread methodologiesfor the study of rural social change as well as objects of study intheir own right. In the light of the myriad studies which haveemerged over the years, it would require a separate report in orderto cover this sub-field adequately. Fortunately one trend report andbibliography is already in existence covering the field of communitystudies in general (158), while more restricted reviews of the fieldare available in articles by Ford and Sutton (112), Olson (271), and



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Sanders and Lewis (307).Olson’s blistering attack upon the banality of rural community

studies in the United States provides a useful benchmark fromwhich to trace the developlment of rural community research upuntil the present day. In many respects the mid-1960s was a periodof considerable turmoil in the field of community studies. As wehave already noted, the rural-urban continuum, which had acted asthe chief frame of reference and conceptual raison d’etre of many ofthese studies, was falling rapidly into disrepute. This was partly theresult of theoretical advances, but more importantly it was due tocumulative empirical refutation. (The list of such studies is now along one, but in addition to Lewis’s (209) early criticisms, it in-

cludes 9, 10, 40, 214, 275, 365, 369). Partly as a result of theseempirically-based criticisms, the very notion of ’community’ alsocame under attack both on the grounds of its ambiguity andbecause it was suspected of being theoretically misleading(e.g. 330). Hillery’s well-known analysis of the various definitionsof community (162) had also undermined the confidence of com-munity sociologists by highlighting the very idiosyncratic use of thebasic object of study. Finally rural community studies, as Olson’sarticle illustrates, became bound up in a generalized attack upon’abstracted empiricism’ (242) on account of their impressionisticmethodology, their excessive descriptions of local ecology, socialorganizations and social participation, and their parochial andahistorical bias. Consequently there was during the late 1960s an in-creasing amount of doubt as to the value of rural communitystudies and a consequent decline in their output. The tradtiion ofrural community studies which had achieved ’classic’ status in thediscipline as a whole (e.g. 173, 126, 352) suddenly petered out. AsSanders and Lewis have more recently remarked:

... the holistic, thought-provoking community studies of an earlier day, studiesthat provided both good ethnography and a systematic look at communities ascomplex but meaningful wholes (irrespective of theoretical orientation) seem tohave lost their popularity, if not their utility. The places like ’Plainville’,’Elmtown’, ’Springdale’, and other countless pseudonymous locales no longerseem to interest rural sociologists as laboratories for community studies. (307,p. 49)

This depressing conclusion is fortunately less applicable, as we shallsee, outside the United States.



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Nevertheless the Land Grant College machine is apparently stillcapable of churning out the same old flimsy pieces of communityresearch that were condemned by Olson. In terms of resources go-ing to waste this is infinitely more depressing. More than a decadeafter Olson’s paper Sanders and Lewis were able to find that the

proportion of descriptive studies has changed only slightly (p. 47).In words reminiscent of many earlier critiques of the quality ofrural sociological research they conclude:

... unfortunately, many of them are either poorly done, relatively useless, orboth. Too much effort is still being expended by too many people on studieswhose empirical or theoretical contribution to the discipline is nil, or at bestobscure. The shortcomings attributed to rural sociology by earlier writers ... arestill very much in evidence in the literature surveyed despite the notable im-provements... and imaginative new directions being explored by some ruralsociologists. Mindless empiricism - often poorly done, at that - seems to be ahardy perennial in this field and is to a degree unjustifiable even by those whomight defend Experimental Station publications done with public funds as pro-viding general information of use to certain lay publics. (307, pp. 47-48)

Apart from the shortcomings to which Sanders and Lewis draw at-tention, such research also tends to be self-defeating. As Olsonpointed out:

Conducting research to help bring about solutions to problems faced by rural0olk is part of the rural sociologist’s positive evaluations of small town life; hisbelief that morality, freedom and equality emanate from the small communityprevents him from being aware of underlying realities...The focus on problemsolving is rationalised by the ethic and serves as a substitution for the resarcher’sfailure to expand the range of data to which he limits himself.Thus, the rural sociologist is faced with the necessity of defending the rural

ethic while at the same time sabotaging it at every level by his emphasis on’speeding the flow of technology to the rural community’ which is part of the

problem-solving orientation. (271, p. 348)

Only very recently, in the wake of Hightower’s (160) attack onrural sociology, has the realisation of this contradiction begun toinfluence a more critical approach to rural community change. Weshall return to this below, but in the meantime it is necessary todraw a discreet veil over this tradition of rural community studiesand examine the more encouraging developments which have beenoccurring outside North America.Community studies have also gone out of fashion in Europe,

although the genre continues in fits and starts accompanied by,



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perhaps, a more realistic appraisal of their limits and possibilities.There has, for example, been a notable movement away from ex-ploring communities as objects of study in their own right towardsusing a community study as a methodology to study broader socialprocesses (7, 21). The use of community study as a method has alsoattracted social historians and historical anthropologists (perhapsthe most successful example is Le Roy Ladurie (207); a useful sum-mary and handbook is Macfarlane (222)). The study of com-munities for their own sake has therefore declined, part of thegeneral disenchantment with the ’abstracted empiricism’manifested by such studies. This decline has also been associatedwith the downfall of the rural-urban continuum which provided arationale for such studies. In consequence we have recently beenspared the former plethora of descriptive studies of rural com-munities in which they are depicted, somewhat over-simplistically,as static, unchanging ’traditional’ social structures fighting a

rearguard action against the encroaching and corroding forces of’modernity’ (c.f. the comments of 276, 369). There is now a

widespread realization that the processes of rural change are morecomplex than this and that, as we have already seen, change cannotbe regarded as an exogenous factor which impinges upon an other-wise static rural community. Many of the factors responsible forsocial change in rural society occur from within - in, for example,the rationalization of agriculture - and there is now a recognitionof the need to knit together an analysis of both indigenous and ex-ogenous causal factors into a more holistic analysis of communitychange.

This, however, places the community sociologist in something ofa dilemma. Having been convinced that a holistic analysis is

necessary in order to understand the processes of rural communitychange, why bother with small-scale locality studies in any case?One answer is that community studies, whatever their weakensses,allow the sociologist in Arensberg and Kimball’s celebrated phrase’to get to grips with the social and psychological facts in the raw’(7). In addition it is important to recognize that the communitydoes act as a point of reference and a source of social relationships,both objectively and subjectively for most of the population. In-deed, it is plausible to argue that during the 1970s there has been arevival of ’community’ in the sense that there has been an increaseddesire to create or re-create a sense of community in an apparentlyde-humanizing and rapidly changing modern world (262). In part



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this revival in ’community’ values has been due to the re-assertionof a Romantic anti-urbanism and anti-industrialism in Western

societies during the 1970s under the impact of economic recessionand political instability. Moreover the increasing outcry against en-vironmental pollution, the growth of the ecology movement, theawareness of possible ’limits of growth’ (245, 168) and the beliefthat ’small is beautiful’ (313) have all contributed to a remarkablerevival of Arcadian values and a renewed desire to live in ’real’ -

which is to say, rural - communities. Rural sociology itself, giventhat it was founded on the basis of such value judgements, has notbeen entirely immune to this tendency. There has seemed oncemore to be a social, as well as a sociological, purpose in studyingthe dynamics of small rural communities in order to uphold theirperceived strengths and to defend these qualities against the threatsto their existence represented by the centralizing and bureaucratiz-ing trends of modern society. (For example, see the extracts col-lated in 301, Chs. 3, 9, 11, 12).

This line of reasoning allows community studies to become aseries of morality tales about trends in contemporary rural society.Such studies become throwbacks to the ’classic’ studies cited bySanders and Lewis above. Indeed, as they point out:

To be sure, the survival of community sociology does not depend on the survivalof rural community studies. Nonetheless, the latter constitute a major part of theroot system of community sociology and one might question whether the demiseof such studies - if such it be - has come prematurely, before the potential thatsuch general, comprehensive studies have for both empirical and theoretical con-tributions to our discipline has been exhausted. (307, p. 49)

Outside North America this tradition of rural community studieshas, however, continued, whereby rural communities have been ex-amined for what they can elucidate about wider societal processes.These communities are studied as microcosms of broader social

changes (c.f. 21, Ch. 2). Precisely because remote villages havecustomarily been regarded as the most stable, backward and un-changing elements of society, they have been studied for what theycan illuminate about the effects of widespread and often revolu-tionary macro-social changes at the ’grass roots’. (Examples in-clude 167, 250, 95, 116, 380, 40). Should this trend continue, thisuse of community studies as a method of examining the impact ofwider social changes will take the sociological study of rural villages



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much closer to the tradition established in social anthropology.Moreover insofar as it involves a much greater emphaiss uponchange and process then one of the traditional weaknesses of ruralcommunity studies will have been overcome. The danger, however,is that such changes will again be anticipated in the outmodedpolarities of traditional/modern or gemeinschaftlgesellschaft.

There are, nevertheless, other good reasons why rural communi-ty studies remain worthwhile enterprises. Despite the tendencytowards vertical integration in agriculture and the growth of farm-ing companies with a structure somewhat similar to those found inmanufacturing industry, agriculture continues to remain

predominantly in the hands of family proprietorships. One fruitfulline of enquiry has therefore proved to be the development of anunderstanding of how the family structure ’fits in’ with the lan-

dholding structure. The most famous example of this is undoubted-ly Arensberg and Kimball’s classic study of County Clare in thewest of Ireland (6). Intensive community studies of the kind carriedout by Arensberg and Kimball are often the only way in which thelinks between family and landholding can be fully explored. In ad-dition it enables some assessment to be made of the importance ofthe family structure in determining the degree of change in lan-dholding over time (for examplle, concerning decisions over expan-sion) or how the family adapts to the constraints placed upon it bythe exigencies of the market in agricultural produce. (See, for ex-ample, 369, 251, 177, 40, 128, 123.) The importance of family pro-prietorships in agriculture has also enabled the ownership of themeans of production to remain in predominantly local hands,despite the extent to which important commercial decisions affec-ting the rural economy are increasingly being made elsewhere. Thismeans that rural employment and rural political power remain inlocal hands so that locally-made decisions remain important,especially for those employed in agriculture and related industries.Thus, while it is necessary to acknowledge that absentee lan-

downership, vertical integration, state planning and bureaucraticdecision-making may all have reduced the extent of local

autonomy, this can only be established empirically through detailedcommunity studies rather than assumed in advance on the basis ofempty theoretical speculation.These concerns lead us back to issues raised earlier in this

report concerning the connection between landholding and thesystem of rural stratification. Community studies have proved to



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be an important method of examining this question, althoughmuch will depend upon the precise configuration of locally andextra-locally held resources. Certainly before a viable study of ruralcommunity power can be undertaken the parameters of local powerneed to be carefully specified and the relationship between the localsocial system and the wider societal context must be indicated (see,for example, the comments on 15, by 290, 128, 82). These issueshave been explored more thoroughly in the field of peasant studieswhere explicit attempts have been made to theorize about the ar-ticulation between the local and the national and its effect upon the

peasantry’s political consciousness and political mobilization (e.g.202, 244, 375). Within the field of peasant studies this interest hasarisen from an emphasis on the local orientation of peasant culture,which, following on from a predominantly American tradition ofcultural anthropology, has been regarded as a definingcharacteristic of the peasantry (297, 319, 374, 196). SimilarlyGaleski (123) has explained the tenacity of the peasant’s communi-ty orientation by noting that while society needs the peasant (orsome such agricultural cultivator) in order to produce food, thepeasantry does not need society and can subsist without its in-

terference with considerable equanimity. There is quite an extensiveliterature on ’the peasant community’ and its relationship to bothlocal and national systems of power, albeit often concerned withthe uninstitutionalized personal politics of patron-clientelism (sum-marized by 49) or the institutions of personal influence like theMafia (35). We also know a good deal about how, and in whatways, this community orientation is broken by the process of com-mercialization as peasants are drawn into the wider world of

market relationships (see, for example, the extensive literature onthe ’Green Revolution’ and summarized by 280) but less isunderstood about how the pattern of rural community power is af-fected by such changes. This is largely because there are very fewstudies of rural community power in areas dominated by thecapitalist agriculture of the developed world (examples include 224,263, 365, 108).Undoubtedly the greatest challenge to established structures of

rural power has come from the social transformation that has over-taken rural areas in all advanced capitalist societies: the decliningsignificance of agricultural employment and the arrival of an

’adventitious’, mostly ex-urban population of rural ’newcomers’.This pronounced demographic shift has provoked the conceptual



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problems in rural sociology described earlier in this report, for notonly can it not be fitted easily into the framework of the rural-urban continuum but where these changes have occurred most ex-tensively it has severed the strong intellectual and institutional linksbetween rural sociology and the sociology of agriculture. In the lasttwo decades, therefore, rural society has become more urbanized,more middle class and less dependent upon agriculture for itseconomic activity. The long decline in the proportion of thepopulation living in rural areas, which set in, with varying degreesof rapidity, in the nineteenth century in most advanced capitalistsocieties, has been reversed - though it continues in the moreremote rural hinterlands (18, 19). Thus as the mechanization ofagriculture has released a substantial proportion of the rural

population to urban areas, so they have been replaced by an over-whelmingly professional and managerial middle-class group of

commuters, retired people and second home owners who mostlylive in the countryside and work, or formerly worked, in the towns.This ’quiet revolution’ (2) in the social composition of rural societyhas had considerable impact. It has clearly changed the class struc-ture of rural society and the balance of local power; it has also ledto a new set of land-use conflicts concerning agriculure versustourist and recreational uses; it has led to a redistribution ofresources - political, economic and social - in rural society; andit has disrupted, subjectively and objectively, the pattern of therural ’community’.For more than a decade rural sociologists have been busy tracing

the consequences of this change. Particular attention has been paidto the cleavages created in the local rural population by thenewcomers (see, for example, 275, 77, 69, 70, 2, 99, 260). Anumber of studies have documented the disruption in the formercommunal solidarities of the rural village caused by the arrival of anew, non-agricultural and ex-urban population. Such an influx hashad a profound effect on undermining the ’closed’ aspects of manyrural villages and has been a widespread phenomenon in WesternEurope and parts of North America. When the village was an ’oc-cupational community’ (see 22) it was frequently a close-knit col-lection of families with extensive kinship and occupational connec-tions. In many respects these villages were the kind of small-scale,total social structures that Coser describes as ’greedy institutions’,which



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... though they may in some cases utilise the device of physical isolation, tend torely mainly on non-physical mechanisms to separate the insider from the outsiderand to erect symbolic boundaries between them ... Nor are greedy institutionsmarked by external coercion. On the contrary they tend to rely on voluntarycompliances and to evolve means of activating loyalty and commitment. (73,p. 6)

The adventitious population, by penetrating this greedy institutionin such large numbers, has threatened to destroy it, or at leastforce it to adapt to their presence. New divisions have arisen, bet-ween ’locals’ and ’newcomers’ which often cut across class lines.Indeed Pahl (275, 276) has argued that rural villages offer uniqueopportunities as ’natural laboratories’ (in the Chicago Schoolsense) for studying the impact of nationally-induced social changeson the social structure of local communities, especially where thecompetition for scarce resources is affected by these changes, as inthe case of housing.

It is not surprising, therefore, that changes in the social composi-tion of rural villages have brought with them new sources of con-flict. Such conflict has involved an increase in the struggle for cer-tain scarce resources, such as housing or land, but it has also in-volved conflicts of ideology and life-style. The alien, urban middle-class ways of life of the newcomers tend to disrupt established pat-terns of behaviour, and with them of status, in the village, which inturo may lead to resentment. Subjectively many of the newcomersarrive in search of ’community’ and believe they have found anauthentic example in the rural village (311, 367). They possess, inPahl’s vivid phrase, a ’village in the mind’ (275), according towhich they expect the local population to conform. Ironically,however, their destruction of local status structures (291) often en-sures that this quest for a static and harmonious ’community’ is

fruitless. Indeed, as far as the locals are concerned, they stand ac-cused of having destroyed it. This irony is underlined by the dif-ferent conceptions of ’community’ held by the two groups. For thelocals it is communal - that is, affective and informal, based uponan overlapping of neighbourly, occupational and kinship ties -while for the newcomers it is associational - constructed out of

participation in formally designated voluntary associations. Thisdistinction lies much closer to Tonnies’s original designation of ge--meinschaft and gesellschaft, whereby they denote different patternsof human association, rather than the reified, descriptive sense in



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which they were later applied. Furthermore since many rural

sociologists have shared the Romantic pre-occupations of many ex-urban newcomers, it has occasionally been difficult to separatesubstance from artifact in research findings on this issue, as in

Sanders and Lewis’s beguiling statement that ’It is a truism ofAmerican community life that voluntary organisations provide themechanisms for carrying out many communal goals.’ (307, p. 39)

Given the conventional consensus view of the rural community inrural sociology in which ’class’ and ’community’ are regarded aspolar opposites it is not surprising that the ’phenomena of thedistribution of power’ in rural villages have been examined in termsof status rather than class. The plausibility of this approach to therural community has remained for so long, partly because of thestrength of the cultural tradition of the rural idyll, but also because,until the peasant-based revolutions of the 1960s challenged such aview, there seemed few overt acts of conflict or rebellion on thepart of the rural population, compared with the longer revolu-tionary tradition of the urban masses. The myth of the rural idyllwas therefore able to feed upon itself. As a consequence we know

remarkably little about the changing class composition of ruralsociety in advanced capitalist countries. Assertions by Pahl (275)and Newby (260) that rural society is becoming polarized betweenthe affluent who have chosen to live there and the poor who are

trapped there need more widespread empirical exploration (forAmerican insights see 59, 67, 103, 363). The implications of thispolarization for ’rural resource development’ (364) also requirefurther consideration. With the continuing reduction in the

agricultural labour force there has arisen a lack of confidence in the’viability’ of the rural community as it has been traditionally con-stituted and a fear for its future (see the selections in 301). It istherefore particularly important that rural sociologists revive the’classic’ tradition of community studies in order to see whether thispessimism is justified and to contribute towards the developmentof appropriate policies where such fears prove to be well-founded.Far from rural community studies having outlived their usefulness,a revival of theoretically relevant studies is long overdue.

The Eclipse of the Rural World?

The changing social composition of the rural population, together



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with the growth of state intervention in agriculture, the move

towards vertically-integrated corporate agribusiness and the declin-ing autonomy of the rural community, have all tended to increasethe integration between the ’rural’ and ’urban’ sectors of advancedindustrial societies. This has led to a great deal of speculation aboutwhether we are witnessing the obliteration of a specifically ’rural’society and whether a new conceptual apparatus is therefore re-

quired in order to interpret this transformation and lead to a moreadequate explanatory theory of rural social change. In the wake ofthe demise of the rural-urban continuum, the search for such atheory has been conducted sporadically and without the vigourwhich has characterized, say, urban sociology. Nevertheless therpare a few lines of enquiry which rural sociologists appear to be inthe process of pursuing which might yield a more coherenttheoretical base in the future.An early statement of the problem was Stein’s synthesis of a

number of ’classic’ American community studies, The Eclipse ofCommunity (332). Stein argued, on the basis of empirical evidenceculled from these studies, that locality as a principle of socialorganization was in severe, and apparently terminal, decline. Thisprocess represented the ’eclipse’ of community of his book’s title.It had been brought about by three important social processeswhich characterized modern society: industrialization, urbaniza-tion and the growth of bureaucracy. These processes broke downthe autonomy of local communities and eroded the distinctive and

unique aspects of local cultures. Modern society became convertedinto mass society and the structural supports of social segmentationwere removed. These centripetal tendencies of modern societycreate a number of social consequences in their wake: not only thedecline of local autonomy, but increasing rural-urban interaction,remoteness from private and public decision-making and the crea-tion of a mass consumer market with standardized ways of life.Stein’s designation of an ’eclipse of community’ implies an eclipseof the rural world, too, as sparsely-populated rural areas becomemarginalized or peripheralized by the processes of modern develop-ment. More recently Summers et al. (336) have brought Stein’sargument up to date by charting the continuing ’corporate inva-sion’ of non-metropolitan America. However, Summers suggeststhat more centrifugal tendencies are now at work in both industrialrelocation and the ex-urban migration of the population, althoughthis is accompanied by the continuing centralization of political



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and economic power. Summers has also explored these issues em-pirically in a study of rural industrialization in Illinois where the’eclipse of community’ is accompanied by the de-centralizing ofeconomic activity. This suggests that the process of ’eclipse’ is morecomplex than Stein maintained - that to some extent, at least, thecentralization of power relations may continue to the accompani-ment of the de-centralization of industrial location. (For com-parative material, see 337.)As indicated earlier in this report, rural sociology’s current crisis

is intimately connected with the secular trends in rural societywhich Stein and Summers have outlined. If the decline of the rural-

urban continuum left the subject-matter of rural sociology bereftof a theory, then the threatened eclipse of the rural world hasthreatened to deprive it of its subject-matter, too. If the processeswhich are shaping contemporary rural society cannot be reducedto, or explained in terms of the category ’rural’, where does thisleave rural sociology? Earlier in this report it was suggested that,following the example of urban sociology, this nagging questioncould only be satisfactorily dealt with if rural sociology, at thetheoretical level, was integrated with sociology tout court and ifsimultaneously sociologists theorized about the production of

social and spatial forms and the nature of the links between them.In recent years a start has been made on this task, althoughsignificantly many of the theoretical insights have been developedoutside rural sociology, as institutionally defined, and imported into apply to a particular empirical problem. No single systematicbody of theory has yet emerged in rural sociology itself which dealswith these problems, but increasing attention is being paid to

theories which have been developed elsewhere. These currently con-stitute potentially interesting lines of enquiry and no more. A rangeof influences are discernible in them and by no means have all thevarious difficulties been adequately reconciled. The following istherefore a list of ’theoretical work in progress’ and the categoriza-tion presented here is not a mutually exclusive one.

(i) Dependency Theory

In the last decade rural sociology has been influenced by a varietyof theories, or theoretical perspectives, which it has imported fromthe sociology of development. Until the early 1960s, the sociologyof development shared with rural sociology the over-simplistic ap-



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plication of reified, static categories such as gemeinschaftlgesellschaft and traditional/modern, a naive and largely unexamin-ed evolutionism and a strong adherence to a vague form of

technological determinism. Andre Gunder Frank, in a celebratedpaper (113), challenged all of these assumptions, and offered atheory of underdevelopment in terms of ’dependency’ - in effect,a mixture of a Marxist theory of uneven economic development,allied to a political theory of imperialism. Frank argued that thedependence of satellite colonial economies on the capitalist in-

dustrial centres of Western Europe and North America promotes adual economic system and an associated class structure (an ’ar-

ticulation of modes of production’ within a specific historical’social formation’) which accounts for the ’development of

underdevelopment’ in the Third World, especially Latin America(see the important collection of papers in Cockcroft et al. (eds.)(66)). Associated with this process there are characteristic patternsof industrial organization, urbanization and clientelist elite rule

(see 356). The key term to describe this situation is ’dependence’:

By dependence we mean a situation in which the economy of certain countries isconditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which theformer is subjected. The relation of interdependence between two or moreeconomies and between these and world trade, assumes the form of dependencewhen some countries (the dominant ones) can expand and can be self-starting,while other countries (the dependent ones) can do this only as a reflection of thatexpansion, which can have either a positive or a negative effect on their im-mediate development. (90, p. 231 )

It is probably fair to state that within the sociology of develop-ment, dependency theory is now considered somewhat pass~, hav-ing been subjected to a number of thoroughgoing critiques in recentyears (e.g. 51, 359, 100, 274, 233). Nevertheless some of Frank’soriginal insights have been elaborated and investigated in such away as to produce a considerable theoretical and empirical spin-off. Within rural sociology, Frank’s notion of ’dependency’ hasappeared attractive, partly because it describes the increasingeconomic and political peripheralization of rural society, but alsobecause it addresses, however partially and inadequately, the linksbetween economic development, social structure and spatial struc-ture which underlie this process. It has enabled some rural

sociologists, for example, to examine the dependency of remoterural areas on urban, industrial and political centres of decision-



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making and to explain the persistence of rural poverty by referenceto the dependence of power regions on power relations centredelsewhere. The crucial difference is that these relationships occurintra- rather than inter-nationally. (See much of the writing on theItalian Mezzogiorno, e.g. 290; also, in the United States, the

studies of Appalachia discussed in 356; and Frank’s approach hasalso informed some of the studies of rural Scotland, e.g. 53, 54,174).

(ii) Centre-Periphery Theory

In response to some of the perceived inadequacies of dependencytheory, two elaborations upon it have emerged: internal col-

onialism theory (see the following sub-section) and centre-

periphery theory. The latter is a curious amalgam of central placetheory, developed mainly by geographers, classical politicaleconomy, both Marxist and non-Marxist in interpretation, and thesociology of regional development. At the time of writing it is en-joying something of a vogue, perhaps because it is capable of suchwide interpretation and, within rural sociology at least, because it iscompatible with much of the previous tradition of research. It hasbeen possible to discern an embryonic centre-periphery theory inGalpin’s early formulations about trading areas, for example,while central place theory has long been used to understand thenature of rural settlement patterns (63).

Centre-periphery theory is not really a theory of anything, but itdoes provide a kind of holistic descriptive device which allowschanges in the socio-economic structure of society to be related tochanges in the spatial structure. Central place theory, from which ithas emerged, was developed by geographers from the 1930s on-wards in order to explain the nature of industrial and urban loca-tion (64). At one level this ’theory’ merely enables the pattern ofsettlement to be understood in terms of economies of scale:

development takes place in nodes or clusters because there areeconomies of infrastructure and service provision to be gainedfrom such a pattern. Within rural sociology and social

demography, this was used to explain such variables as populationgrowth by reference to distance from larger population centres (e.g.42, 46, 179). In both urban and rural sociology central place theoryhas, in this interpretation, lent itself to a form of highly descriptivesocial area analysis, a version of social book-keeping in which



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various attributes of the population are catalogued and related toresidential location. Central place theory has also been influentialamong planners in promoting a ’growth centre’ strategy of

regional development, whereby industry, public services, culturalactivities and decision-making processes are concentrated on par-ticular localities with multiplier effects for the surroundinghinterlands. Walls summarizes this theory succinctly as follows:

As cities grow to centres of economic concentration, a system of hierarchicalrelationships is established among metropolitan areas and between a metropolisand its surrounding area. In this model, development is seen as an uneven andunbalanced process. A polarisation of development between metropolitan areasand the hinterlands takes place, diminishing the chances for growth in ruralareas. An opposite spillover effect works to provide extra income to the

hinterlands through a trickling down of economic activity in the metropolis. In’

other words, growth in the peripheral regions is dependent upon the develop-ment of core areas. These theories of location and uneven growth haveculminated in the growth centre or development pole strategy. (356, p. 20)

Central place theory has been given a sociological gloss throughthe work, among others, of Immanuel Wallerstein (354, 355). In-itially Wallerstein’s work consisted of a historical description of theexpansion of the capitalist economic system from the centre to theperiphery, the effects of this expansion at the interface betweencapitalist and pre-capitalist societies and of the qualitative changeswhich such expansion wrought at the centre. More recently,Wallerstein has attempted in a number of his essays (collected in355) to construct a theoretical explanation of the nature and con-tent of capitalist expansion across the world. This transition hasbeen accompanied by a shift from quasi-functionalist descriptivecategories to a greater willingness to engage with Marxist politicaleconomy. In this guise centre-periphery theory has proved to behighly suggestive (see Wallerstein’s work which illustreates ratherwell the wide variety of ways in which centre-periphery ’theory’ canbe used). In essence it is a descriptive label, useful because it directsour attention to the relationships between ’centre’ and ’periphery’rather than considering each in its own terms. This allows a moresatisfactory holistic analysis to be developed, but centre-periphery’theory’ does not itself constitute such an analysis: it is alwaysparasitic upon other theories. Indeed unless centre-peripheryanalysis is hitched to another specific theory then a certain mean-ingless relativism can quickly set in: one analyst’s ’centre’ is



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another analyst’s ’periphery’. Furthermore there is no consensusover what precisely accounts for the centralizing tendencies of con-temporary industrial societies. Marxist writers vary according towhether they emphasize factors relating to production or circula-tion or consumption; neo-classical influences are present in theWeberian universal of rationalization; human ecologists emphasizedemographic change and competition over land use. Consequentlyit seems likely that centre-periphery theory will remain an analyticalidiom rather than a rigorous theory. Whether this will prompt astimulating eclecticism or a meaningless elasticity of terminologyremains to be seen.

(iii) Internal Colonialism

Most theories of internal colonialism consist basically of a Marxistpolitical economy allied to a centre-periphery spatial model.

Although there is a danger that any form of spatially differentiatedsocial stratification could be termed colonialism (see 285) and thatthe term will consequently become vague and meaningless, it has

been used with great facility to account for the uneven developmentbetween centre and periphery under capitalist conditions. Hechter(159), for example, has analyzed the relationship between Englandand the Celtic fringe of Wales, Scotland and Ireland in these terms,and ’internal colonialism’ has also been used to describe the ex-

ploitation of other peripheral areas within contiguous nation-states(e.g. 41, 34). Whether all of these examples count as internal col-onialism is, however, a moot point. Gorz, for example, offers arather inclusive definition:

The geographical concentration of the process of capitalist accumulation hasnecessarily gone hand-in-hand with the relative - or even absolute - im-

poverishment of other regions. These latter regions have been used by the in-dustrial and financial centres as reservoirs of labour, of primary and agriculturalmaterial. Like the colonies of the great European empires, the ’peripheral’regions have provided the metropolises with their savings, their labour power,their men, without having a right to the local reinvestment of the capital ac-cumulated through their activity... In this way whole new territories havebecome zones of unemployment and poverty, or regions emptied of theirsubstance to the point of no return - that is, to a point where, lacking a suffi-cient proportion of youthful inhabitants as well as industrial and cultural cen-tres, these regions cease to have the capacity for development. (143, pp. 23-24;see also 180)



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By contrast Gonzalez-Casanova adopts a much narrower defini-tion :

Internal colonialism corresponds to a structure of social relations based on

domination and exploitation among culturally heterogeneous, distinct

groups...It is the result of an encounter between two races, cultures or civilisa-tions, whose genesis and evolution occurred without any mutual contact up toone specific moment...The colonial structure and internal colonialims are

distinguished from the class structure since colonialism is not only a relation ofexploitation of the workers by the owners of raw materials or of production andtheir collaborators, but also a relation of domination and exploitation of a totalpopulation (with its distinct classes, proprietors, workers) by another populationwhich also has distinct classes (proprietors and workers). (142, pp. 130-132, citedby 356, p. 40)

This is a much more specific approach to internal colonialism andone which would exclude most of the empirical studies of internalcolonialism which have hitherto been carried out in advanced

capitalist societies. However, Gorz’s definition, while more per-missive, could refer to any process of uneven development or evento certain forms of absentee ownership. In this context ’internalcolonialism’ is often used as a metaphor rather than as a rigorouslydefined concept, but like many metaphors it easily slides into arather loose usage.

These three approaches are becoming more influential within ruralsociology as the realization grows that rural society cannot anylonger, even for heuristic purposes, be considered as a relativelyclosed social system. These theories are by no means mutuallyexclusive - they are often combined in various configurations -nor are they exhaustive: other theories of rural society can be foundin the literature and various forms of ad hoc theorizing continueunabated. However, these theories do have in common a greaterwillingness to break down the categories of ’rural’ and ’urban’ andlook for social processes common to both. They also explicitly at-tempt to relate the social structure to the spatial structure of

regional development and underdevelopment. It is in these two

aspects that their greatest promise probably lies.There is also one institution to which all of these theories draw

our attention: the state. At various times in this report, the impor-tance of the state in directing the development of rural society and



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sponsoring the economic prosperity of agriculture in advanced

capitalist societies has frequently been emphasized. This is clearlynot the place to enter into the complex and extensive discussion ofthe role of the state in advanced capitalist societies which currentlyconsumes the attention of so many sociologists and political scien-tists. It is, though, worth pointing out that just as rural sociologymust pay attention to this debate if our understanding of ruralsocial change is to be advanced, so might theorists of the state havemuch to learn from rural sociology by examining state interventionin agriculure. Be that as it may, it is quite clear that the increasingintervention of the state in rural society can only properly be con-sidered on a comparative basis. A particularly important com-parison to make is with the advanced industrial societies of EasternEurope. Here various attempts have been made to take agricultureout of the market, as well as to implement a planned system ofrural and regional development. The case of Eastern Europe,therefore, not only offers some insights into the limits and

possibilities of state intervention, but enables some assessment tobe made about whether the characteristics of contemporary rural

society already noted are due to the development of capitalism orindustrialism. Moreover rural sociology flourishes in state socialistsocieties and has contributed to the advancement of the disciplinein the West.

6

STATE SOCIALIST SOCIETIES:A COMPARATIVE DIMENSION

To consider adequately the enormous literature on agriculturalchange in Eastern Europe would itself require a separate trendreport, particularly if research findings not available in the Englishlanguage were to be considered. Consequently this section will notattempt to present a comprehensive overview of rural sociologicalresearch in all of the state socialist societies in Eastern Europe, butwill instead concentrate on a few pertinent themes which relate tothe central concerns of the aforegoing discussion.

Rural sociology in Eastern Europe cannot, of course, be con-sidered as a unity, any more than the rural social structures of therespective Eastern European societies. Some countries possess a



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long and flourishing tradition of sociological research, includingrural sociology. Poland represents the foremost example, whererural sociology has built up a strong tradition of research andwriting since the time of Znaniecki. In other countries, such as theSoviet Union, sociology is a comparatively recent phenomenon andrural sociology has barely entered into its stride. (See 76 for ahistory of Soviet rural sociology.) Nevertheless, one of the moreremarkable aspects of rural sociology in Eastern Europe concernsits close convergence with the research style of rural sociology as ithas emanated from the United States. There is the same close col-

laboration with agencies of the state involved in the promotion ofrural social change and the re-organization of agricultural produc-tion. There is also a similar appraisal of the role of rural sociologyas an aid to social engineering - as a kind of lubricant to themachinery of rural development. There is even a noticeable

similarity in the selection of problems and methodology ofresearch: social book-keeping and ’dust-bowl empiricism’ are by nomeans confined to American rural sociology and have nestled com-fortably into the apparatus of state planning in Eastern Europe,posturing about ’Marxist-Leninist scientific principles’ not-

withstanding. Social fact-gathering therefore remains the domi-nant orthodoxy in Eastern Europe, with important theoretical con-tributions to the discipline remaining few and far between.The predominant reasons for this need hardly be emphasized.

Tire agricultural sector has proved to be a persistently difficult pro-blem for all of the state socialist societies in their drive towards in-dustrial development. As has already been noted earlier in thisreport, Marxist or neo-Marxist analysis has traditionally paid littleattention to the smallholding peasantry and the problem of socialistdevelopment in agriculture. As Kolankiewicz has pointed out:

From Marx’s belief in the French peasant ’giving up his faith in the

smallholding’ to Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ unrealistic appraisal of the relation-ship between the various strata of the Russian peasantry, the tendency has beento ’wish away’ small-scale peasant agriculture and failing that, to apply moredirect methods. ( 191, p. 1 )

In a similar vein Wright has written that:

The entire history of Soviet policy toward agriculture is a record of impatiencewith the constraints imposed on industrialisation by peasant agriculture. Thatimpatience led to repeated attempts to ease or circumvent the constraints ad-



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ministratively, from the top down, with a minimal diversion of resources from in-dustry. At best, the record shows only partial or temporary success, followed byfrustration and renewed impatience. (376, p. 51)

It is this ability of the peasantry to frustrate the schemes of bothstate planners and social scientists which has led Shanin to dubthem ’the awkward class’ (320, 318). It is the attempt to overcomethese frustrations which has ushered in rural sociology as an ad-junct of state agriculture and regional planning, where most of theEastern European regimes have been beset by problems concerninga highly fragmented agricultural landholding sector, a rapidlyageing rural labour force, a shortage of urban housing stock, a lackof agricultural investment and a peasantry for whom, as

Kolankiewicz wryly puts it, ’socialised agriculture in the form ofthe state farm and particualrly the collective has for both subjectiveand objective reasons not been to date an object of admiration’.(191, p. 1)

Rural sociology in state socialist societies has, therefore,somewhat resembled the value-orientation of American rural

sociology in the 1950s and 1960s in wishing to promote social andtechnological innovation in agriculture while striving to understandthe causes of resistance to such changes on the part of the’backward’ or ’traditional’ elements in the rural population. Therehave, however, been some significant differences in the general ap-proach and implementation of such studies. While the diffusion ofinnovation studies which for so long dominated American ruralsociology were concerned rather narrowly with the adoption of newagricultural technology, the innovations in Eastern Europe haveclearly been of a more widespread and directly politicalcharacter. Rural sociology in state socialist societies has thereforeattempted to promulgate a much more extensive re-organization ofrural society tout court under the aegis of an explicitly plannedeconomy. What has therefore been involved is a massive attempt tounderstand the sources of (mostly) peasant resistance to variousforms of socialized agriculture and socialized property relation-ships, whether state farms, collectives, co-operatives, dual-

occupationalism or whatever. (Examples include: in Poland, 350;in Hungary, 152 and the work which has continued in the wake ofSzelenyi’s ’under-urbanisation’ studies (see below); in Bulgaria, 91,92, 286; in Yugoslavia, the works cited in 131; in Romania, 61, 62.)This issue has also fascinated Western observers of the attempted



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socialist transformations of Eastern European agriculture, thoughthey have tended to draw rather different conclusions from thesame observations (see, for example, 200, 109, 241). The doggedresilience of the private plot and its disproportionate contributionof agricultural production has been frequently noted: 25.5 percentof total agricultural production from 15 percent of arable land inthe USSR; 33 percent from 9.2 percent in Hungary; and 37.9 per-cent from 9.2 percent in Bulgaria. In many state socialist socities -

Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia - the contribution of the peasantprivate plot has not only proved to be vital to overall productionand, indirectly, to political stability, but it has been encouraged invarious ways by land reforms instituted in the aftermath of thefailure of socialized agriculture to expand production on a suffi-cient scale.Thus while the peasantry has received undue attention from rural

sociologists in Eastern Europe, representing as they do an

’obstacle’ to rural development, collective farms and other formsof socialized agriculture have not:

Not only socialist countries are interested in collective farming, but for variousreasons farmers throughout the world. And that has been the case for manyyears. They have also become the subject of rich literature, but which primarilyconsiders economic and organisational questions. Sociological studies are rare,and decidedly few in the socialist countries. (339, p. 199)

As Szwengrub goes on to point out, somewhat cryptically, this stateof affairs ’may be interpreted in various ways’ - which indeed it

may. It would be interesting, for example, to learn whether thealienation of farm workers on large-scale enterprises referred to byRushing (304) and Raup (295) in the American context has beenabolished under socialism. Countries like Czechoslovakia and

Bulgaria have created huge collective farms whose labour force isorganized into ’brigades’ which transcend village boundaries. Theytake part in a highly mechanized and specialized form of produc-tion not dissimilar to the agribusiness enterprises of the West -yet sociological studies of these farms are virtually absent. Only inPoland, it seems, has ’a somewhat greater interest by scien-tists... in recent years in the human role in the agricultural produc-tion process’ been observable and ’works have appeared on theconditions of state farm workers’. (175, p. 203; this paper sum-marizes the Polish literature on this topic.) Here Ignar points to fac-tors which might equally well apply to farm workers on large-scale



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agribusiness farms in the West:

The question of occupational prestige and social position is without doubt one ofthe most important problems in this sphere. It is directly associated with satisfac-tion deriving from the work and with the self-evaluation of its utility to the socie-ty. A complex of such problems is accented by the conclusions of this author’sresearch in 1972. Very striking was the gap between the low level of prestige ofthe occupation and the state farm worker’s awareness of the great social utilityof their work. In the author’s opinion, this was a key reason for the difficultiesconnected with acquiring valuable personnel and the, until recently, observednegative selection of the human factor by state farms. This contradiction un-doubtedly had negative consequences for the general social and vocational situa-tion of agricultural workers and on the production activity of the farms...

This is emphasised here since previous research clearly established that thedegree of identification of the workers’ personal aspirations with the aims of theenterprise has been low on state farms...It is extremely important in concretecases that the workers be conscious of the principles and character of work of stateand collective farms as institutions and enterprises. The situation with this con-sciousness is still unsatisfactory...(175, pp. 214-215)

This, however, remains a somewhat isolated and candid account ofthe social problems associated with collectivized agriculture. In

general, the assumptions underlying the prescribed methods ofsocialist transformation have remained unquestioned by rural

sociologists, at least in their published work.In one important respect, however, rural sociology in Eastern

Europe has remained one step ahead of the discipline in the West.Because the transformation of the countryside has been planned aspart of a total re-distribution of resources and the rapid in-

dustriaization of the entire economy, rural sociologists havebecome accustomed to locating their studies within a holistic

analysis of society rather than being concerned only with the ’rural’in its own terms. This has of necessity rendered rural sociology amuch more outward-looking sub-discipline than in the West.

Whatever the rigidities and inadequacies of the precise analyticalcategories employed there has been a readiness to regard ruralsocial change as part of a macro-social tranformation and thereforeto employ a rather broader perspective on these changes than hasbeen customary in rural sociology in the West (123). For example,the categorizations deriving from the rural-urban continuum havecut little ice in Eastern Europe where the kinds of transformationsbeing wrought have concerned both ’rural’ and ’urban’ sectors andhave derived from a mostly centralized state planning apparatus.



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This has resulted in the tendency to regard ’rural’ and ’urban’categories as dependent rather than independent variables. Thedivision between agriculture and industry, or town and coun-

tryside, has been regarded as merely part of the social and spatialdivision of labour which must be overcome in the process of

socialization.From this it is a short step to considering some of the theoretical

issues which we raised early in this report regarding the conceptualbasis of rural sociology and the kind of theoretical frameworkwhich rural sociology required in order to regenerate itself. To

recap briefly on the points made above (see pp. 34-36), rural

sociology needs to ally itself to general theories of social develop-ment, while in order to conceptualize adequately the notion of’rural’, it also requires a theory of the social production andorganization of space. Somewhat inadvertently rural sociologists inEastern Europe have found themsevles engaged in both of thesetasks, the first because of the imperatives of planned industrialdevelopment forced them to address issues at a macro-social leveland the second because of the explicit attempt to explain and over-come ’the historically developed basic structure of regional ine-qualities’ (152, p. 135) bequeathed from the previous era. There areechoes here of the approach to socio-spatial inequalities adopted bythe ’new’ urban sociologists and geographers in the West, likeCastells and Harvey, but applied in this case to the consideration ofmuch broader regional areas. In this context perhaps the most im-portant theoretical contribution to have emerged from EasternEurope in recent years is the so-called ’under-urbanization thesis’,associated with the work of two Hungarian sociologists, Gy6rgyKonrad and Ivan Szelenyi. Its importance lies not only in the factthat it addresses the theoretical issues referred to above, but that itdraws together a number of crucial issues relating to the structureof state socialist societies: the role of the state, urban-rural ine-

qualities, the importance of the private agricultural sector, the

worker-peasant (and employee/non-employee) divide and the limitsand possibilities of incorporating the agricultural sector into asocialized economy. Since the concept of ’under-urbanization’ hasnot been given the attention in rural sociology which it deserves

(and which, to some extent, it has received among urban

sociologists), it seems appropriate to elaborate upon it here.Konrad and Szelenyi begin their analysis by drawing some

parallels between the over-urbanization of many Third World



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countries and the phenomenon of under-urbanization in EasternEurope:

Over-urbanisation in developing countries is produced by the low level of in-dustrial investment and an insufficiency of employment. Under-urbanisation inEastern Europe, on the other hand, is the result of excessive industrialisation atthe expense of the infrastructure. The high rate of industrial investment couldonly be assured by central planning which made the growth of the infrastructuredependent upon economic policy rather than demand and withdrew infrastruc-ture products in short supply from the market, distributing them as ad-

ministrative rewards, independent of wages... Since housing and the products ofthe infrastructure were not considered commodities, wages and salaries could befixed at a much lower level than in countries at a similar stage of economic

growth. On principle wages did not include the price of infrastructural productsand services, since the State provided these for all wage-earners as an additionalallowance. The proportion of industrial investment was too high, that in invest-ment goods too low; relatively little housing was built out of State resources.Most of those finding new employment could therefore not be allotted dwellingsthrough administrative channels, and their income was too small to allow themto obtain their own housing on the limited open market. (193, p. 207)

This unbalanced form of industrial development has not allowedworkers to decide for themselves whether they move closer to theirnew industrial employment or remain in the countryside and traveldaily into the towns and cities: in practice they have had little op-tion other than to reconcile themselves to the latter. This patternhas been found not only in Hungary, but also Czechoslovakia, EastGermany, Poland and Romania (339, pp. 38-39; 194, p. 157).Konrad and Szelenyi also argue that the effects of under-urbanization have provided a major cause of social tensions inEastern Europe today.The under-urbanization of these societies has, according to

Konrad and Szelenyi, three important consequences. First, the in-frastructure is significantly less well-developed than could be

justified by these societies’ level of industrial production. Secondlythe share of national income devoted to ’communal investments’ is

much smaller than in the capitalist countries of Europe. Thirdly thestrategy of industrial development necessarily finds itself in conflictwith the demands for investment in the process of urbanization.The result is a form of ’pseudo-urbanization’ as regional plannersseek to curb urban growth so that funds will not be diverted fromindustry. It follows from this that an urban dwelling becomes muchsought-after and something which the higher social strata possess a



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much better chance of obtaining:

All this suggests the characteristic difference between the population of townsand villages is today to a lesser and lesser extent the industrial-agriculturaldichotomy, and to a greater extent the division is between manual work in both

industry and agriculture, and work in the service industries and of a clerical orprofessional nature. This means that the categories of vertical or hierarchicalsocial stratification can be applied in order to differentiate between village andurban society. Families of a lower social status live in villages and those of ahigher social status in towns; the bulk of those in villages work with their hands,while the proportion of those doing clerical or professional wok in 1970 was one-third in towns and two-fifths in Budapest and the larger towns, a significantnumber of these being employed in the service industries...The slope of the ur-banisation curve in industrialising Hungarian society therefore corresponds tothat of social stratification. (194, p. 161)

This process of stratification is reinforced further by the depressionof agricultural prices in order to subsidize urban wages. One majorconsequence of under-urbanization has been to disadvantage therural dweller at a number of levels by producing unequal returns tolabour, unequal access to housing, entertainment, retail services

and education, and by burdening the rural dweller with the cost oftransport should he or she seek employment in the towns. Under-urbanization therefore produces an uneven distribution of theburden of industrialization and does so in a manner which is

generally socially regressive (despite the principles enshrined in theideology of regional planning policies).The disadvantaged rural dwellers seek to redress their depriva-

tion, mainly by supplementing their earnings from urban employ-ment with the cultivation of domestic smallholdings. A minifundistagriculture therefore grows up alongside the large-scale state farms.As Konrad and Szelenyi conclude:

It is a charactertistic of under-urbanisation that the growth in industrial employ-ment exceeds the growth in the capacity of towns to absorb population. Thus anincreasing number are forced to have their domicile in villages, though they areemployed in industry... Commuters are mainly peasants who are restratified foreight hours a day. These mainly semi-skilled and unskilled workers make up the’new working class’ ... Following eight hours work and long hours spent waitingand travelling, they are often met at the station by their wives, carrying two hoes,and they go off for another four or five hours work on land allotted to them asshare-croppers by the co-operative or to their own household plots, which in thecourse of the years have been turned into extremely intensively cultivated small-holdings. (194, pp. 170-171)



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This ’new working class’ forms a transitional class (191) which livesin two economic systems simultaneously and which shows greatsensitivity towards changes in the relative advantages and disadvan-tages of each. The ability of these worker-peasants to make a virtueout of necessity therefore explains the continuing vigour of theprivate agricultural sector in Eastern Europe. The worker-peasantsas a ’new awkward class’ (191) have demonstrated boundless in-genuity in making the most of the opportunities offered to them intheir otherwise unfavourable conditions:

If there is a boom in industry, this group’s labour power is transferred there; if inagriculture, then it limits or temporarily suspends its industrial work. This groupcomprise the bulk of the migrant labour force that is so often cursed by industryfor instability. However, this is not caused by any lack of discipline, but by thefact that the conflict between domicile and place of employment leads them tofight in this way for higher wages. Though ’new workers’ may appar to bedefenceless at first sight, they are certainly not powerless in the great strugglethat goes on over the distribution of goods. (194, pp. 171-172)

In a more recent paper which considers at length the evidence fromPoland, Kolankiewicz agrees with this conclusion:

Through its policy of industrial location, under-urbanisation and employmentstrategy [the state] raised the peasant-worker phenomenon to a mass scale. In-itially it could have been identified as a temporary phenomenon. Today howeverwith the development of a particular life-style, aspirations and expectations, butmost importantly through its innovatory use of the smallholding throughout thefamily life-cycle it is possible to hypothesise the development of a ’transitional’class reflecting the transitional status of the private/socialised sector relation inPoland today...It is only through such a complex analysis that we can hope tounderstand the relationship between the state and various social classes andcategories characteristic of present-day Polish society which, whilst seeminglyperipheral, reflect deep-seated tensions and contradictions. (191, pp. 47, 48)

In a paper written immediately after his abrupt departure fromHungary, Szelenyi has extended his analysis further, attempting todevelop a more coherent theory of the state and to offer a morecomparative analysis of regional management in Europe and NorthAmerica (339). In particular he argues that the role of the

’redistributive state’ is not determined by a technocratic rationalitybut by a new type of class conflict between the ’immediate pro-ducers’ and the ’expropriators’, now in the guise of the regionalmanagement system which redistributes the economic surplus both



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spatially and socially:

After the general ’infrastructural poverty’ of the ’siege economy’ those who findthemselves suddenly on the [lower] ranks of the regional hierarchy, disprivilegedby State redistribution, and especially those who live in communities deprivedfrom all means for capital investment, might start wondering why they, whomake their contribution to the ’common good’, to the national income, as well asanyone else does have a smaller share from the supposedly common pie, or is thispie not so common after all? Furthermore, it is not only the size of the slicewhich can be questioned, but the very system of redistribution, why is it

necessary to expropriate the surplus and then redistribute it with complicatedscientific procedures and to finance a huge apparatus of administration and evenscientific research for this purpose, when even the poorest village could financeitself and probably invest more than at present, if it was allowed to withhold atleast a fraction of the surplus produced by its inhabitants...From this perspective we might argue that the social conflicts of the contem-

porary under-urbanised, regional system cannot be described merely in terms ofinequalities in the allocation of grants by redistributive management, since alsothey reflect the conflict of interest between immediate producers and the

redistributive system. The basic conflicts do not arise because the grantsallocated to certain categories of the communities, or to certain regions, are in-adequate, or because the differences in per capita grants are too large or toosmall. The basic conflicts arise from the way, and principles by which surplus isexpropriated and later re-allocated (339, pp. 30, 50)

This analysis invites comparisons with the redistributive role ofthe state in Western societies, particularly in the context of

agricultural and regional planning policies - and this is somethingwhich Szelenyi explicitly hopes to stimulate. However, the impor-tance of the ’under-urbanization thesis’ rests in its ability to drawtogether many of the crucial issues which lie at the heart of anyanalysis of contemporary state socialist societies. A satisfactorytheoretical characterization of these societies remains unavailable,though Konrad and Szelenyi’s work suggests how such a

characterization might be formulated. Within the field of rural

sociology, however, its interest lies in the linking together of thesocial and the spatial and in relating changes in the rural socialstructure to changes in the structure of society as a whole. Certainlythe ’under-urbanization thesis’ remains the most importanttheoretical contribution of relevance to rural sociology to haveemerged from Eastern Europe since Chayanov’s theory of the pea-sant economy.



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7EMERGENT PROBLEMS

This brief, highly selective and deplorably inadequate account ofrural sociological research in state socialist societies is intended toshow some of the benefits of investigating the role of the state inagricultural and regional development in a comparative perspec-tive. It also illustrates the way in which the generation of socio-spatial inequalities commonly attributed to capitalism may partial-ly be due to the process of industrialization per se, whether within aprimarily planned or primarily market economy. (For a more sus-tained argument along these lines, placed within a context of ThirdWorld development, see 213.) Comparative research among the ad-vanced industrial societies of the world is, as has been remarkedseveral times during this report, something of a rarity in ruralsociology beyond the kinds of social book-keeping research pro-moted by the OECD and similar organizations. Similarly ruralsociologists have not been concerned with theorizing explicitlyabout the role of the state in sponsoring rural social change. This isin contrast to other branches of sociology where there has in recentyears been a revival of interest in the state (analagous to the atten-tion paid to the state during a previous period of economic stagna-tion in the 1930s), although much of the debate has occurred at afairly abstract theoretical level rather than through a detailed em-pirical examination of the state apparatus in particular policyareas. Nevertheless within rural sociology there are a few signs thatthe role of the state is becoming an emergent research area (144;301, pp. 217-237), which can only benefit both the sociology of thestate in advanced industrial societies and rural sociology.

This growing awareness of the importance of the state appears tohave emerged from three inter-related concerns. The first, which ismost prevalent within Western Europe, derives from the increasingawareness of the irrationalities of the Common Agricultural Policyof the EEC. In recent years this has contributed to an increasingpoliticization of agricultural policy, which in turn has provoked avigorous public debate about the whole structure of the CAP. As aresult it is difficult to omit any reference to the role of the state (in-cluding the supra-national state) from a discussion of future trendsin rural society. A likely development here is the conjoining ofhitherto separate discussions of farm policy by agriculturaleconomists, pressure-group analysis by political scientists and the

I



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investigation of corporatism by sociologists (e.g. 372; and, with ap-plication to agriculture, 140) in a more holistic analysis of the roleof the state in moulding the rural society of the future. In the

United States, however, the recognition of federal farm policy as acrucial factor has emerged from a rather different set of concerns(see 12, 149). Here the state has played a less visible and more in-direct role, relying less on direct intervention but nonetheless

fostering the growth of agribusiness by a variety of fiscal and othermeasures. While in the EEC it is the cost of farm support policieswhich have become the major public issue, in the United States ithas been, as we have seen, the accelerated trend towards corporateagribusiness, the increasing rate of attrition of small farmers andthe breakdown of the rural way of life. In political terms thepressures are therefore the opposite of those in the EEC - how tostabilize or even increase the number of small farmers, as opposedto how to reduce their total - but in both cases the role of the stateis likely to come under increasing surveillance. The third factorlikely to bring about a greater awareness of the role of the state in-volves regional inequality. The persistent period of economic

stagnation during the 1970s has given a further boost to the cen-tralizing tendencies of the capitalist system. Those areas on theperiphery have suffered disproportionately from unemployment,lack of investment, reduction in social services, and the otherdeleterious effects of economic decline. This has led both to in-

creasing demands on the state to promote a more vigorous policy ofregional planning and attacks on the centralizing tendencies of thestate iteslf with demands for more regional autonomy (for a

review of the literature see 80, 147). There is now a growingcynicism concerning the effectiveness of regional planning in theface of the continuing economic marginalization of sparsely-populated areas (see 52) or the failure to deal with the apparentlychronic problems of rural poverty (356). This, too, is likely to focusattention on the state and the ability of its agencies to succeed intrying to eliminate severe regional disparities in standards of living(see 172). This latter strand of thinking is already emerging in muchof the literature on centre-periphery relationships and dependentdevelopment referred to above. However, together these threethemes will stimulate much more critical awareness about the roleof the state than hitherto and this in turn will form an importantpart of a new sociology of agriculture in advanced industrialsocieties.



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The economic crisis of the 1970s, from which many of these pro-blems are derived, has also coincided with the emergence of

another important issue which has proved to be of much morerelevance to conventional rural sociology: the growth of en-

vironmentalism. The contribution of sociology to the environmen-tal movement has, however, been indirect at best - primarily astudy of the movement rather than the problems threatening ’theenvironment’ per se - although in associated areas such as land-use planning, recreation, tourism and leisure, rural sociology hasrather more direct relevance. Nevertheless, over-simplifying a little,sociologists have been mostly interested in the ideology of en-vironmentalism and the study of the environmental lobby as asocial movement (see, for example, 74). Thus O’Riordan, con-cluding his overview of environmentalism, summarizes it as

follows:

Environmentalism as a vehicle for social reform is fuelled by two complementaryanxieties. The first is an actual realisation that something must be done, becausecertain aspects of living are already intolerable. This is the realisation of scarcity- scarcity of certain wild species and landscapes, scarcity of low-cost (or at leastlow-environmental cost) energy, food and other raw materials; scarcity of publicamenity and a growing scarcity of reasonably priced private amenity... Second-ly, there is a growing anxiety about the future - a pervasive uncertainty that hasall but replaced the beguiling self-confidence which has characterised the rulingelite in Western democracies ever since the industrial revolution. This widespreadloss of faith in oneself, in others, and in areas of government is undoubtedly themore troublesome of the two anxieties, because without faith and a belief in thepossibility of improvement for all mankind the centre cannot hold and civilisa-tion as we know it will end. (272, p. 252; this book is particularly valuable in thatit contains a massive, and exhaustive, bibliography.)

In the light of the grandiose claims made by some of the leadingwriters in the environmental movement, it is, perhaps, not surpris-ing that a good deal of sociological effort has gone into de-

mystifying and even de-bunking some of the more pretentiousstatements emanating from the environmental lobby. For insofaras environmentalists have been engaged in producing social

blueprints then sociologists have been amply qualified to commenton them.

By its very nature environmentalism challenges many of themotives, aspirations and achievements which support the contem-porary world and invites an assessment of the conflicting claimswhich are made upon that world in the light of equally conflicting



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prejudices and values. This is what makes the recent debate aboutthe environment so interesting for the sociologist, for although en-vironmentalism offers no generally accepted solution to the

predicaments which it has so capably exposed, it has forced in-

terested parties to articulate their most deeply cherished values andto offer a wide range of utopias (74). All of this suggests that en-vironmentalism is not simply a technological and ecological matter,but also a social, political and even a philosophical question. Thusit is arguable that the qualitative changes in advanced industrialsocieties which engendered the enviromental movement in the early1960s involved not so much the presence of environmental destruc-tion as the fact that the new forms of pollution and disruption imp-inged upon the politically articulate and powerful. A simple pieceof historical reflection soon demonstrates that ’environmentalism’

problems are not new: industrialization rendered many localitiesvirtually uninhabitable as long as two hundred years ago. What isnew, however, is that the more recent forms of environmentalthreat cannot be avoided. As Enzensberger has pointed out, thesqualor of nineteenth-century urban and industrial conditions

... would undoubtedly have presented a ’neutral observer’ with food for

ecological reflection. But there were no such observers. It occurred to no one todraw pessimistic conclusions about the future of industrialisation from thesefacts. The ecological movement has only come into being since the districtswhich the bourgeoisie inhabit and their living conditions have been exposed tothose environmental burdens that industrialisation brings with it. What fills theirprophets with terror is not so much ecological decline, which has been presentsince time immemorial, as its universalisation. To isolate oneself from this pro-cess becomes extremely difficult. (102, p. 10)

This demonstrates that the combination of ’amenities’ that con-stitutes the environment is what Hirsch in his important book, TheSocial Limits to Growth, has described as a ’positional good’ -that is, something which is fixed in supply and whose consumptionis dependent upon one’s position in society (168). Positional

goods, therefore, come into the hands of the early rich, but thefeatures which render them attractive can only be retained if accessto them can somehow be restricted. At this point notions ofphysical scarcity and social scarcity intersect.

Environmentalism has become relevant to the concerns of rural

sociologists because agriculture has been consistently at the centreof the debate since, at least, the publication of Rachel Carson’s



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Silent Spring in 1962. This has prompted a widely-held belief thatmodern farming practice has transformed the ’traditional’ ruralecology for the worse and has become a sources of pollution alongwith cities and factories. In addition, increasing affluence andwidespread car ownership has put increasing pressure on ruralland-use for recreational and tourist purposes, creating a more en-vironmentally aware population at precisely that time at whichthese trends threaten to destroy the amenities which so many peoplecherish. At the present time, with both the increasing trend towardsagribusiness and the further growth of opportunities for recreationand leisure, it seems likely that these pressures will increase. Wemay therefore expect environmentalism to continue as an emergentproblem within which rural sociologists have a role to play. In par-ticular the most important contribution of rural sociology is likelyto be the insistence that the wider social implications of en-vironmentalism be considered and recognized and to throw doubton the claim of many ecological gurus to be ’non-political’. For thedebate over environmentalism is in reality a deeply political one,revealing issues which are the very stuff of politics - distributionaljustice; individual freedom versus a planned allocation of

resources; the impact of science and technology on society; thedefence of private property rights; the expansion of individualchoice and the satisfaction of social needs. Beneath the conflictover the environment there is therefore a much deeper conflict in-volving fundamental political principles and the kind of societywhich is envisaged for the future. This no doubt explains the differ-ing political character of the environmental movement in differentsocieties - more radical in the United States, for example (237),than in Britain (219), although in both societies it is dominated bythe middle class (48, 1). Once again there appears to be con-siderable benefits to be gained from rural sociologists looking atthis issue in both a comparative and a historical context.

8

CONCLUSIONS

This report has not attempted to offer a fully comprehensive reviewof all the material which has been produced in the field of ruralsociology since the last occasion on which it was featured in Cur-



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rent Sociology in 1957. Given the limitations on accessibility ofmaterial and facility with languages, this is inevitable, but there hasalso been a deliberate attempt to focus on those issues which arerelevant to the current crisis in rural sociology as evidenced in thecomments included in the opening pages of this report. Indeed itcould be argued that the portrayal of rural sociology presented hereis unrepresentative and in a way this would be a valid accusation.Much of the routine work carried out by rural sociologists, par-ticularly in the United States, has not been included or has beenreferred to only in passing. This has resulted in the omission bothof lines of enquiry which have now been virtually played out (as inthe literature on the diffusion of innovations) and research whichhas made little or no contribution to the advancement of the

discipline (as in the theoretically parched wastelands of social fact-gathering). Instead a conscious effort has been made to address thecentral conceptual and empirical problems which currently facerural sociologists and to offer an account of the present state of ig-norance as much as of the present state of knowledge. In this wayit is hoped to stimulate further research in these areas.

It has been a major theme of this report that rural sociology hasstill not adequately filled the conceptual vacuum left by the demiseof the rural-urban continuum. This is reflected in the paucity ofproblem formulation which continues to afflict the field and whichlies at the heart of rural sociology’s current malaise. It has been

argued forcibly that in order to overcome these problems ruralsociology could learn from the example of its urban counterpart bybeginning from a holistic theory of society within which the ’rural’can be satisfactorily located and, as a corollary, developing theorieswhich link the social structure with the spatial structure. There aresome signs that rural sociologists may be prepared to move in thisdirection. The example of the ’under-urbanization thesis’ has beencited at such length because, whatever its faults, it at least tries toaddress these problems (as well as neatly linking the ’rural’ with thecreation of the ’urban’). The other major example concerns the useof centre-periphery models of socio-spatial structure, though herethe danger is that the enthusiastic adoption of centre-peripherytheory will simply produce another form of geographical reduc-tionism - the rural-urban continuum expressed in a new

vocabulary. Nevertheless as long as centre-periphery models re-main firmly linked to processes of socio-economic accumulationand centralization then perhaps this danger can be avoided.



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Although this report has specified the kind of theoretical ap-proach required to revive rural sociology it has avoided specifyingvery much in the way of content. The logic of the argument thatrural sociology needs to attach itself more securely to central pro-blems of sociology as a whole, implies the need to enter into thevariety of theoretical debates which currently characterize

sociology and this would require a vastly more extended account.In addition there is no desire to foist any one theoretical approachon the majority of rural sociologists - merely an insistence thatthey should become involved in, and address themselves to, thesedebates far more than hitherto. In many respects this is simply torepeat a plea which, as we have seen, has been made by a number ofcommentators on the state of rural sociology for twenty years ormore. A salutary reminder is required that behind the overwhelm-ing intellectual appeal of these arguments there has always stoodthe massive bureaucratic inertia of the funding agencies with theircontrol over the kinds of research which actually obtain support.Undue pessimism is not required at this juncture, however. Thefunding agencies are not monolithic: work of the kind advocated inthis report is funded by them. Intellectual timidity and self-

censorship are equally part of the problem. As Ian Carter (54) hasforcibly argued, the time has come for rural sociologists to comeout of the closet, throw away their under-labourer’s apron andbegin to tackle the big issues which confront them. Recent atten-dance at meetings of the Rural Sociological Society and the Euro-pean Society for Rural Sociology suggests that this may not be anentirely fanciful piece of wishful thinking. But it has taken morethan twenty years for the drip, drip of criticism to produce even thesmallest discernible shift and there is still a long way to go.



Documents

Trend Report: Rural Sociology