Rural Sociology

Rural Sociology1 JoAnn Jaffe, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan and Michael Gertler, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Rural sociology focuses on how rural people and communities are socially, culturally, politically, and economically organized. As a discipline, it has a distinct body of knowledge, specific research approaches, recognizable commitments and discourses, and its own set of institutional relationships. With a broad array of research questions, and often with a comparative perspective, rural sociologists consider how resource-based industries influence the social characteristics of rural communities. Rural sociology was first developed in the United States. While other countries have developed their own approaches to rural sociology, most have been influenced by American traditions. In contrast with general sociology’s perspective that associates urban life with complex societies, rural sociologists assert that contemporary rural and urban communities are the products of modernity. Studying how changes in rural places are related to wider societal and economic processes, rural sociology has also had a tradition of applied and engaged scholarship. The broad focus of rural sociology leads to inclusion of concerns and insights from other disciplines, and it has led many rural sociologists to be interdisciplinary and to collaborate with scholars from other fields. Beginning with the Country Life Commission, established in 1908, and continuing with its influence in the land grant system of universities, the rapid development of rural sociology and rural sociological research was largely underwritten by the US government. Concern about rural poverty, the rapid pace of outmigration, and widening gaps between city and 1 For citation as: Jaffe, JoAnn and Michael Gertler. Forthcoming 2017. “Rural Sociology”. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology. Edited by Kathleen Korgen Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1 country spurred these investments in rural sociology. By the 1940s, the institutional separation of rural sociology from sociology, its embedment in the land grant system, and its links to extension services2 oriented the field towards a technologically-driven modernizing agenda. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that this alignment substantially shifted as a result of re-engagement with more critical perspectives. History of Rural Sociology Rural sociology as a separate discipline had its beginnings in the United States early in the twentieth century. Concerned with the social fabric of rural community life, it was public policy- and problem-oriented from the start. Early rural sociologists sought a better life for rural people. As Gillette wrote in his second rural textbook, Rural Sociology (1922:6), the “great business of rural sociology is, and perhaps ever will be, the attainment of a sympathetic understanding of the life of farming communities and the application to them of rational principles of social endeavour.” As noted by Falk and Gilbert (1985), however, the view of rural sociology as an engaged science was contested by those who sought to establish the discipline as a value-free science whose task was more to describe and explain than to understand and improve. This tension has been a persistent feature of rural sociology, with one side ascendant during some periods and the other being more prevalent at other times. American rural sociology is, in part, a product of the Progressive Era of the early 1900s–1910s. This era gained the “progressive” label because government was expected to play an active role in the social and economic life of the nation and because science 2 Professionals and programs that focus on the popularization and practical application of scientific research knowledge through knowledge-translation, outreach, and dissemination techniques. 2 was seen as a principal means through which progress could be obtained. Antecedents of rural sociology can be found in the 1880s in the social gospel movement that was concerned with how Protestant churches could address pressing social problems, and in the social survey movement that focused on social problems that had developed out of the twin issues of industrialization and urbanization. In rural areas these issues were manifest in outmigration, the scale and pace of technological and social change, and in transformations taking place in agriculture. In 1900, about 60 percent of the US population was rural and 40 percent lived on farms; by 1930, this had declined to 43 and 25 percent, respectively (Dimitri et al. 2005). The Long Depression of the 1870s–1890s had incited farmers to organize to counter the power of the banks, railroads, grain companies, and other large commercial entities that were increasingly shaping the character of rural life and negatively affecting farm livelihoods. Along with other initiatives, this helped spur the development of consumer and producer co-operatives and helped rural people become an important political constituency. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt established the Country Life Commission under the leadership of Liberty Hyde Bailey. The Commission studied 12 rural communities and its 1909 report drew attention to “special deficiencies” of rural communities that were related to injustice, inequality and the unequal development of the countryside and were keeping rural people from experiencing full and fruitful lives. It recommended that the sociological expertise of the land grant universities be applied to these problems (Peters and Morgan 2004). 3 The land grant universities had been founded in 1862 through the Morrill Act. The purpose of these universities was to offer an advanced education to those who would not be able to attend private or religiously based institutions. They were, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts… in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” The Second Morrill Act of 1890 created 17 historically black land-grant colleges south of the Mason-Dixon Line. One consequence of these initiatives was to encourage rural farmers and ranchers to call for public support for the development of scientific and practical agricultural knowledge. This led to the Hatch Act of 1887 that supported the establishment of Agricultural Experiment Stations in every state. Assuring wider access to knowledge produced in land grant universities and experiment stations was the mission of the Cooperative Extension Service created by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. Rural sociology became more firmly entrenched within the land grant and extension systems with the passage of the Purnell Act in 1925, which allocated money to rural sociology, agricultural economics, and home economics (Larson and Zimmerman 2000). First appearing in 1936, the journal Rural Sociology published many of the localand national-level studies funded under the Purnell Act.3 3 Belatedly, in 1994, 29 Native American tribal colleges received land-grant status. These, too, are sites for research initiatives addressing community economic development, resource management and governance issues, and other sustainability challenges that confront rural residents—particularly Native Americans. 4 These new structures created demand for rural sociologists, men and women who typically would have come from rural communities and have had their own experiences in rural organizations. As time went on, they also likely would have been educated in land grant institutions. They generally possessed a deep knowledge of rurality, a familiarity that informed and shaped their research questions and standpoint (Smith 2011). Rural experiences may also have shaped their convictions that knowledge should be used for the betterment of society and that intellectuals should be responsible for promoting social as well as scientific progress (Kirkendall 1966; Gilbert 2001). The first course in rural sociology, “Social Conditions of American Rural Life,” was offered by Professor C. R. Henderson in the sociology department at the University of Chicago in 1894 (Sanderson 1917). The first instructor position in rural sociology was held by Kenyon Butterfield at the University of Michigan in 1902 (Sanderson 1917). The first textbook, Constructive Rural Sociology, was written by John Gillette and appeared in 1913 (Olsen 1991). The first department of Rural Sociology was established at Cornell University in 1915. Many of the early rural sociologists were not trained as sociologists. Charles Galpin, a founder of rural sociology who taught in the department of agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin, held degrees in literature and rural education. Dwight Sanderson, the first president of the Rural Sociological Society (RSS), had degrees in agriculture and entomology. This early disciplinary heterogeneity helped to give rural sociology a flavor of heterodoxy. In 1898, W. E. B. Dubois conducted what might be seen as the first rural sociological inquiry: The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: a social study. This was a 5 multi-methods field investigation that resulted in a place-based community study of the kind that has become one of the hallmarks of rural sociological research. It integrated research on quantitative dimensions of economic structure, archival and other records of social life, surveys, interviews with key informants, and observation intended to provide a social scientific basis for rural reform. Although somewhat marked by Victorian prejudices, it was absent the sort of grand theorizing that characterized the more standard Spencerian sociology of the day. As documented by Julie Zimmerman (2013), because early rural sociology defined its research object as “the totality of rural life,” rural women and their perspectives made frequent appearances. This was necessary in order to reach a more “holistic understanding of the organization of rural life” (Zimmerman, 2013). Furthermore, women and their problems were considered emblematic of issues faced by farm families and rural communities. This is seen, for example, in The Woman on the Farm, a book by Mary Meek Atkeson published in 1924 as part of a rural sociology series edited by Galpin. From the late 1910s to the 1930s, rural sociology moved closer to sociology but then broke away again to become an independent discipline with its own institutional relationships, assumptions about social realities, and preferred research modalities (Smith 2011; Lowe 2010). When the RSS separated from the American Sociological Association in 1937, this both reflected and reinforced the divergence of rural sociology from sociology. Fundamental ontological and epistemological differences figured in this split, though other reasons such as greater integration of practitioners into rural sociology are frequently cited. 6 Like most economists, sociologists tended to see “the rural question” and “the farm question” in evolutionary terms, as issues of historical development that would be resolved through processes of modernization. In contrast, rural sociologists generally understood the rural and the urban as linked in processes of on-going co-constitution (Smith 2011; Zimmerman 2013). Moreover, rural sociology, as engaged social science, encourages research that “plays its part in making real rural worlds” by collaborating with rural people to realize better rural futures (Lowe 2010: 312). Sociology, meanwhile, was more concerned with deepening its claims to scientific objectivity and neutrality. Soon after the associations split, rural sociology saw a large influx of research funds made available under New Deal and, eventually, World War II-era programs. These funds, however, came with strings attached. According to Anderson (1959), accountability to funders and administrators shaped research agendas and created an academic culture that hindered the development of the field. The fortunes of rural sociology began to wane with the dismantling of the New Deal. This decline continued with the narrowing of USDA research priorities at the end of WWII, which culminated in 1953 with the termination of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, known by that time as the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (Larson and Zimmerman 2000). Research funding was refocused narrowly on standards of living, adoption and diffusion of technologies, demography, availability of services, and farm labor. Quantitative, non-policy oriented work was preferred. The USDA was prohibited by Congress from undertaking “cultural surveys” (Larson and Zimmerman 2000: 238) such as it had funded in 1944 when Walter Goldschmidt compared two 7 Central Valley California farming communities and found that large-scale, corporate farming was associated with reduced community well-being (Goldschmidt 1947). By the mid-1950s, rural sociology had shifted to more social-psychological, behaviorist approaches that were common in sociology (Buttel et al., 1990). The academic division of labor assigned the agricultural sector primarily to agricultural economics and the agricultural sciences. This left rural sociology to concentrate mainly on studying the diffusion of innovations proposed by other disciplines, rural communities and community development, quality of life and social indicators, rural institutions and values, and educational and occupational achievement among rural youth. Rural sociologists refocused on the production of “expert knowledge” related to these areas of research (Newby 1983). The New Rural Sociology The 1970s–1980s era was one of critical reflection and new beginnings. A growing number of critics argued that rural sociology had reached an impasse owing to its near-exclusive emphasis on the role of individual action in society and elevation of quantitative methods as the hallmark of good science. Some also contended that the discipline had experienced theoretical closure (Harris et al. 1995) under the “monopoly of structural-functional theory, survey methods, and quantitative analysis” (Gilbert 1982:613). A new and more critical rural sociology drew on neo-Marxist and “left Weberian” scholarship in sociology and political economy. The field was also deeply affected by its exposure to international development sociology theories and to international development practice—both their alternative 8 visions and failures (Buttel 2001). For instance, Latin American rural sociology and development studies were influential through the introduction of dependency approaches that understood the development/underdevelopment of rural areas as intimately linked to the uneven and combined development of global capitalism. Rural sociologists embracing this perspective analyzed the rural in relation to the spatial and temporal division of labor in the wider society (Newby 1980). Returning Peace Corps volunteers and others with international experience came to rural sociology after witnessing violent responses to agrarian reform and community development initiatives. Rural sociologists were influenced by social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s: civil rights, women’s liberation, farmworker rights, environmentalism, anticorporate farming, and anti-war movements among them. This engagement has continued as rural sociologists respond to contemporary versions of these movements, to human and animal rights initiatives, as well as to organizing around food sovereignty, land grabbing, climate change, the corporatization of universities, free trade, fair trade, privatization, and the enclosure of the intellectual and physical commons, meaning the traditions, knowledge, services, natural resources, and spaces that are part of the public trust but have been turned into commodities for private gain. In the context of neoliberal reregulation and restructuring, these challenges and responses continue to influence student recruitment, academic career paths, research agendas, and the many other aspects of the intellectual development of the field. Postmodernism and the post-structuralist turn have also had impacts on rural sociology research. Among typical topics at rural sociology conferences today are: the role of discourse in framing rural problems; concerns with consumption; the construction 9 of rural bodies and identities; the projection of objectivity and power through standards; the production of meaning in rural spaces; and diverse voices and perspectives on rural life. Rural sociology has been challenged by the restructuring of academe, the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields, and the further assimilation of rural sociological themes into geography, anthropology, and environmental studies. Not a few departments have been renamed, merged, or simply decommissioned. On the other hand, researchers from diverse backgrounds are attracted by the sense of community afforded by the Rural Sociological Society. Moreover, despite ongoing urbanization—or sometimes because of it—rural issues remain relevant. For example, many contemporary environmental struggles occur in rural contexts and how rural landscapes and resources are managed has inescapable consequences. Rural places continue to experience decline, restructuring, and new kinds of growth. The impacts of boom-and-bust capitalism are sharply felt. This requires adjustments by rural residents and by rural sociologists, undermining complacency and compelling critical reflection. Rural people find themselves threatened from without and, frequently, from within. Rural sociologists, likewise, sometimes find themselves under siege. Their research may be dismissed or attacked if it is perceived to be in conflict with the interests of important land grant constituencies (Constance 2008). This includes mining and forestry firms, the oil and gas industry, commodity groups, farmers and processors employing migrant workers, industrial hog producers, the agrichemical industry, and the agricultural biotechnology (GMO) lobby. Within the walls of academe, rural sociologists are sometimes targeted by agricultural economists or by natural 10 scientists aligned with productivist agriculture and corporate funders. Further complicating matters, many of the people whom rural sociologists study move back-andforth between rural and urban locales, occupy ambiguous or contradictory class positions, are by turns victims or oppressors, and possess identities and ideologies that are hard to reconcile with objective life circumstances and political interests. Recent rural scholarship reflects, in part, a return to the earliest concerns of rural sociology. These include the experiences of women and others marginalized on the basis of race, citizenship, or economic status. Female rural sociologists have grown in numbers and influence, both in field research and in the RSS. Not coincidentally, the field of inquiry for rural sociology has been extended to include research on men and masculinities, the experiences of rural homosexuals, concentration in agricultural holdings, loss of farmer control over seeds and other inputs, “civic agriculture” and alternative agri-food networks, foods skills and food security, energy sector developments including ethanol and natural gas extraction based on fracking, local cultures associated with mining, farm animal welfare, community forestry, amenity-based rural development, and impacts of returning military personnel. Poverty has been a recurring theme. In the USA, poverty rates are higher in rural areas and persistent poverty is overwhelmingly rural. While president of the RSS, Gene Summers established the Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty, which resulted in the influential volume, Persistent Poverty in Rural America, published in 1993. Rural sociology still tends towards interdisciplinarity. Many rural sociologists are members of other disciplinary organizations, and some have been founders of important interdisciplinary organizations, such as the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society 11 and the International Association for Society and Natural Resources. Rural sociologists frequently collaborate with scholars from other disciplines and with non-academics. Rural sociology forms the core of development sociology and many rural sociologists work in international development. The new rural sociology and the meaning of “rural” The new rural sociology has had an impact on the definition of the term “rural.” The original “rural” of rural sociology referred to spaces and places that had been created through unequal processes of development. In the mid-20th century, however, many rural sociologists adopted a more functional approach to defining rural, which viewed it as having social, demographic, physical, and geographic features. Rural connoted small population centers and low population densities, involvement in primary production, and interaction with nature. Following Tonnies (1957), rural areas were seen to be characterized by community (gemeinschaft) in which roles, values, and beliefs are based on personal ties and face-to-face social interactions. This contrasts with urban areas characterized by society (gesellschaft) in which more anonymous contractual relations, market-based norms, and formal values predominate. The rural, in this view, is a place where there is a restricted division of labor and range of social roles, where social interaction involves relatively few people, and where social identities tend to be similar. Status would normally be based more on ascribed and personal attributes than on achieved characteristics, and social mobility would be restricted. In these dense and overlapping social networks, pressures for conformity would be great and anonymity lacking (Larson 12 1968). While this perspective continues to be influential, other conceptions have come to the fore. According to Van Der Ploeg (1997), early rural sociology recognized the distinctive lifeworlds and habitus of rurality. Later, rural sociologists came to regard “rural” as an empirical category related to population density, lack of services, and the relative importance of agriculture. As this rural declined in significance, rural sociology itself experienced a crisis. Van der Ploeg argues that recent reconceptualizations of rural have restored rural sociology’s relevance. This new conception of rural goes beyond agriculture and is not a reverse image of the urban. Rather, it represents different “aspects of civilization.” The rural is where humans and nature are “co-produced.” Some rural sociologists regard the division of city and country as an ideological artifact that downplays commonalities and the extent of their mutual determination. Bell (2007) recognizes two competing conceptions of the rural: the first is largely material and hinges on demographic and geographic characteristics. The second is the ideal—in the philosophical sense—of the rural. He argues for combining these conceptions since there is much that is ideal in any material account of the rural and much that is material in ideal versions of the rural. International Rural Sociology In Europe, rural sociology was first visible in countries that were formed after World War I, such as Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (Merkowich 1940). Some studies were carried out in the 1930s but World War II disrupted research on rural problems. With the defeat of the Axis powers, attention shifted to rebuilding and 13 modernizing rural places. Rural sociology became “most strongly institutionalized in countries with small farm structures and extensive needs for rural reconstruction, including the Netherlands, Belgium, France, West Germany and Italy” (Lowe 2010: 323). European rural sociology tended to view rural development as requiring national intervention in addition to local community development and individual-level initiatives. Though less evident today, European rural sociology tended to be more theoretically informed than its U.S. counterpart. This may have been due, in part, to its origins in liberal arts institutions (Christenson and Garkovich 1985). The contemporary European approach is exemplified by the Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University, which studies the dynamics of rural transformation from comparative, actor-oriented perspectives, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. Wageningen rural sociologists often work in multidisciplinary teams. They and their other European colleagues publish in the Journal of Rural Studies, the Journal of Agrarian Change, and the Journal of Peasant Studies, as well as in the more discipline-based Sociologia Ruralis. The European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) was established in 1957. In 1964, the RSS and the ESRS jointly hosted the First World Congress of Rural Sociology. This initiative gave rise to the International Rural Sociology Association (IRSA) in 1976 when they were joined by the Latin American Rural Sociological Association (formed in 1969). The Asian Rural Sociological Association joined IRSA in 1992, and the Australia and Oceania Network followed in 1997. Rural sociology was one of two major fields of sociology in pre-World War II Japan, and it has remained an important sub-field. In India, as in many other Asian countries, rural sociological studies became a recognized field 14 only after independence when rural development and poverty alleviation were recognized as crucial to national progress (Desai, 1961). In Australia, rural sociology developed in the 1970s in response to emergent issues of race, class, and gender in rural areas. The Nigerian Rural Sociology Association was formed in 1981. Although there is no panAfrican society of rural sociologists, courses in rural sociology are offered in many African universities. Rural scholarship in Canada presents a somewhat different model. Canadian rural studies are influenced by the country’s position in the world economy, as a neighbor and principal trading partner of the USA but with some features of a peripheral state. Two historical tendencies in Canadian rural sociology are identifiable. One evolved from Francophone and allied Anglophone traditions of ethnographic research in rural areas and communities. The other derived from the political economy traditions of Englishspeaking Canada, as exemplified by Harold Innis’ “staples theory,” which focused on the central organizing roles of the cod fishery, the fur trade, square timber, wheat, and then the mining-based economy (Bakker 1987). Courses in rural sociology, or with significant rural sociological content, are offered in many sociology departments in Canada. A few departments include clusters of self-identified rural sociologists. These are found principally in universities with strong agricultural colleges such as the University of Guelph and the University of Alberta. Rural Sociology, Sociology, and Society Rural sociology as discipline and field has developed somewhat independently of sociology while, at the same time, assimilating generations of 15 sociological thought. Notwithstanding strong roots in land grant universities, as a small discipline, rural sociology has been open to diverse influences and allied itself with initiatives that extend the frontiers of critical enquiry. It is outward looking and interdisciplinary. Rural sociologists are familiar with the vocabularies of, and readily partner with, many other disciplines. This promotes nimbleness and flexibility in rural sociology, though not necessarily a dominant central core. The rural sociological imagination is informed by a standpoint of marginality, being from the margins as a discipline and standing with the periphery in terms of the people, places, and processes studied. This has directed attention towards the origins and reproduction of social and spatial inequalities, and towards “difference” and its development through time. Marginality stimulates a “view from below” leading many rural sociologists to notice and understand things that tend to go unrecognized by or at the center. Via various paths of dissemination and diffusion, the polyvalence of rural sociology helps to connect sociology to arenas and scholarship that would otherwise not be as readily encountered. Rural sociology brings into circulation a body of work focusing on life beyond the city limits and, frequently, beyond the limits of the metropolitan imagination. From the periphery, but neither insular nor peripheral, rural sociologists have promoted scholarly investigation of key contemporary challenges and institutions: property systems (e.g. land tenure and intellectual property regimes), corporations (e.g. global restructuring of agribusiness), technoscience (e.g. biotechnology and the privatization of research agendas). Firmly 16 anchored in the materialities of resource-dependent industries and environmental conflicts, rural sociology has broken trail to link sociology to global struggles for eco-justice, knowledge democracy, and sustainable development. Rural sociology has made its own contributions to the consumption, cultural, and environmental turns in sociology. Rural sociologists have strengthened the sociologies of food, diet, food security, food knowledge, and health (c.f. Lind and Barnham 2004; Jaffe and Gertler 2006; Mooney and Hunt 2009; Carolan 2012). Rural sociologists have shown how the social construction of rural places includes the (re)construction of the bodies and identities of rural women and men (c.f. Keller 2014; Bell et al. 2015). Engagement with the sociologies of the environment and of natural resources have led into studies of industry’s “double diversion” (Freudenburg 2006), the contested reframing of risk (c.f. Stuart and Worosz 2012), and issues of environmental governance (c.f. Jaffee and Newman 2013; Caine 2014), as well as climate change and ‘natural disasters’ such as droughts, fires, and floods. Studying the structural origins of poverty and environmental crises, rural sociologists have added rural dimensions to research on race, class, gender, and sexuality as intersecting systems of domination and resistance, and have introduced sociology to less visible organizations and intellectuals (academic, public, and organic) around the world. Given their research interests and location, rural sociologists logically study links between local and global, rural and urban, and state and market. 17 Rural sociology has had only mixed successes supporting rural development that meets broad human development goals. Like urbanity, rurality remains an aspiration and an open question. Going forward, rural sociology has roles to play in the theoretical and practical reintegration of society and nature, uncovering and cocreating knowledge that will fulfill the unmet promises of the social dimension of sustainable development, and making a just peace between the social and biophysical world. 18 References: Anderson, C. Arnold. 1959. Trends in Rural Sociology. In Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects. Edited by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. New York: Basic Books 360-366. Atkeson, Mary Meek. 1924. The Woman on the Farm. Century Rural Life Books. 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