Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century

Resilience and Transformation

David L. Brown, Kai A. Schafft

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509529889
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Démographie

Rural people and communities continue to play important social, economic, and environmental roles at a time when societies are rapidly urbanizing. This unrivaled critical introduction, now in a comprehensively updated second edition, examines the causes and consequences of major social and economic transformations affecting rural populations in recent decades, explores policies developed to ameliorate problems or enhance opportunities, and highlights the resilience of rural people and communities.

In an engaging, reader-friendly style, the book explores both socio-demographic and political economic aspects of rural transformation through an accessible and up-to-date blend of theory and empirical analysis, with each chapter's discussion grounded in real-life case-study materials. The new edition has been completely revised throughout, with new data and literature, and carefully updated to address emerging issues of direct relevance to rural people and places, including a whole new chapter on rural politics.

Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century will continue to be the standard reading of choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in rural sociology, community sociology, rural and/or population geography, community development, and population studies.

PART I
THINKING ABOUT RURAL PLACES IN METROPOLITAN SOCIETY

1
RURALITY IN METROPOLITAN SOCIETIES

In 2008, the United Nations announced that for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population lived in urban environments (U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division 2007). While the share of population living in urban areas is higher in more developed nations, the United Nations projects that less developed nations will also surpass the 50 percent urban threshold by 2019. If the world is so highly urbanized, why should we care about rural people and communities, particularly in metropolitan societies such as the United States? In the discussion to follow we identify a number of reasons why rural people and places continue to matter in the twenty-first century, even in the context of overwhelming urbanization. These issues will provide the substantive framework shaping our analysis of persistence and change in rural society that is contained in the remaining chapters. However, prior to examining these contemporary issues, we need to acknowledge that concern about rural people and places did not develop overnight. The intellectual legacy of rural studies began over one hundred years ago in response to the profound societal transformations that gave rise to sociology and other social sciences. We briefly review this legacy before turning to a discussion of the reasons why rural people and places matter in contemporary society.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT ABOUT RURALITY

Interest in the social effects of the transformation from rural to urban society traces to the very beginnings of systematic social science. Concern about the perceived negative outcomes of modernization, in particular of industrialization and urbanization, represented one of the central questions driving the new discipline of sociology during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Two titans of classical European sociology, Ferdinand Toennies and Emile Durkheim, shared a concern for the social outcomes of the transformation from rural agrarian to urban-industrial society. Both scholars observed that the nature of social relationships is fundamentally altered in larger, denser, more diverse urban places compared with their rural counterparts. Toennies wrote of the transformation from Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society), while Durkheim used the terms mechanical and organic solidarity to describe the social relationships characterizing urban and rural communities. “What brings men together,” he wrote, “are mechanical causes and impulsive forces, such as affinity of blood, attachment to the same soil, ancestral worship, community of habits, etc.” (Durkheim 1964 [1933]: 278).

They also both argued that industrialization and changes in the organization of agriculture resulted in communities where more socially distant relationships replaced the primary social ties characteristic of villages and the agrarian countryside. Durkheim, in particular, worried that this alteration of the fundamental nature of social relationships would separate people from the institutions and interpersonal influences that regulate social behavior and produce social solidarity. Another early sociologist who contributed to understanding the origin of urban–rural differentiation was Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian-American scholar who founded the department of sociology at Harvard University. His work focused more on demographic and occupational attributes of differentiating urban and rural communities rather than on the relational issues discussed by Toennies and Durkheim (Sorokin & Zimmerman 1929).

In the U.S., this concern was most clearly articulated by Louis Wirth (1938) who felt that urban life released people from social controls and alienated them from their neighbors. He saw urban areas as “communities of limited liability” where increased population size and density reduced community attachment, and family and community ceased being the building blocks of society. We will explore these and other sociological concerns about urban and rural community in greater depth in Chapters 3 and 4. For now it is sufficient to acknowledge that interest in rural (and urban) places and populations has a rich legacy in the history of social thought.

WHAT IS RURAL IN A METROPOLITAN SOCIETY?

Like many terms in common usage, the meaning of rural is somewhat ambiguous (Corbett & Donehower 2017; Koziol et al. 2015). Even within the social sciences there is disagreement about the meaning and exact definition of rural. The strongest disagreement is between scholars who consider rural to be a type of socio-geographic locality and those who see rural as a social construct (Shucksmith & Brown 2016). Let’s examine these two approaches in order to understand their similarities and differences.

THE LOCATIONAL OR “PLACE-BASED” APPROACH TO DEFINING RURAL

Social scientists, policy makers, and program administrators typically define rural as a particular kind of socio-geographic place that is distinguished by certain attributes. By the locational approach, we refer to the practice of spatially defining rural places and comparing these geographic entities with places that are not rural. While scholars, policy makers, and statistical agencies often concentrate on one or another defining characteristic like population size or dependence on farming, most acknowledge that rurality is a multi-dimensional concept that entails a combination of social, demographic, economic, and/or cultural aspects. What distinguishes this “place” approach, however, is the focus on the material attributes of geographically bounded populations.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH TO DEFINING RURAL

Other social scientists consider rural to be a social construction. Keith Halfacree (1993: 34), for example, has observed that, “the rural as space and the rural as representing space” must be distinguished. He contends that a contrast should be drawn between a largely “material” understanding of rural, based on physical space, geographic characteristics, and population density, and a dematerialized concept that places rural within the realm of imagination (Halfacree 2004). Instead of trying to identify social, demographic, environmental, and economic attributes that define rural places and distinguish them from their urban counterparts, this approach emphasizes symbols and signs people imagine when they think about rurality (Cramer 2016).

As Cloke and Milbourne (1992: 360) have observed, rurality becomes a matter of determining how people “construct themselves as being rural,” that is, of understanding rurality as a socially constructed state of mind. In other words, the social constructivist position contends that mental constructs are an element of culture that help to determine what people consider as “rural.” Woods (2006: 11) has argued that this “shifts attention from the statistical features of rural areas to the people who live there …” Hence, places are rural not because of their structural and/or environmental characteristics, but because people who live there think of themselves as being rural with respect to a set of social, moral, and cultural values (Bell 1992; Cloke & Milbourne 1992), an idealized or idyllic landscape (Boyle & Halfacree 1998), and/or a lifestyle more attuned to organic community life than to a more bureaucratic and rationalized form of social organization (Short 1991).¹

In this book we will treat these two perspectives as complementary rather than competitive. We agree with Jones’ and Wood’s (2014) observation that to have analytical value, any locality must have both material coherence and imagined coherence. Yet our approach will most often be in line with the locality perspective, for example, we will treat rural areas as material places where people live, work, and visit, and as spatially delimited natural environments. Following this approach, the next section examines four distinguishing dimensions of places: demographic and ecological, economic, institutional, and socio-cultural – comparing rural vs. urban areas on a number of attributes contained in the respective domains. You will see that rural areas can be defined in terms of what they are and what they are not, for example, in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, or as a critique of urban.

A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL APPROACH TO DEFINING RURAL PLACES

Population and settlement structure

Demographic and ecological attributes such as population size and density are most commonly used to distinguish rural from urban, with the general consensus that rural places are smaller and less dense than their urban counterparts. Rural areas are also thought to be geographically and socially isolated from centers of power and influence which are thought to emanate from urban complexes. Finally, rural areas are considered to be “natural” environments while urban environments are seen as being man made. While rural areas are found throughout the U.S, areas with the highest degree of rurality, as indicated by small population size and spatial separation from metropolitan centers, are concentrated in the Great Plains, the Midwest, the Ozarks, and Appalachia.

Economy

Rural areas can also be distinguished by their economic activities, and in particular by the kinds of goods and services that are produced. Traditionally, rural economies have been characterized by heavy dependence on primary industries such as farming, fishing, forestry, and mining, and these are the types of activities that comprise most people’s images of rural places. As will be shown in Chapters 5, 9, and 10, however, rural economies have undergone fundamental changes in the past fifty years, and workers who live in rural areas now obtain their living from a different array of jobs, some local, and some located at a commuting distance.

Rural economies are not simply distinguished by the nature of their economic activities, but also by the number of establishments they contain and the size of those establishments, by the diversity of economic activities or lack thereof, and by whether economic activity is controlled locally or from a distance. W...