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Rural Sociology

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DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-08-100596-5.22533-X

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Constance D.H. Rural Sociology. In: Neal Van Alfen, editor-in-chief. Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems,
Vol. 5, San Diego: Elsevier; 2014. pp. 62-74.

© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

 Author's personal copy
Rural Sociology
DH Constance, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA
r 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Adoption–diffusion of technology Process by which
individual farmers (or other prospective users of
technology) make decisions about the use or nonuse of a
new technology.
Land grant universities Integrated system of teaching,
research, and outreach created to modernize agriculture.
New Rural Sociology Conceptual approach to the
sociology of agriculture that embraced critical perspectives
of rural development.
Introduction
Rural sociology is historically defined as the sociological study
of social organization and processes that are characteristic of
rural societies and geographical areas where population
densities are relatively low. In practice, modern rural sociology
is considerably more comprehensive than the study of rural
societies. As rural societies do not exist in isolation, rural
sociology increasingly addresses the relationships between
rural society and society as a whole and within the global
economy and society. Vertical linkages to the macrosystem
integrate rural areas into national and global social processes
(Bonanno et al., 1994; Warren, 1963).
Although rural sociology as a discipline originated in the
United States in the early twentieth century, as part of deco-
lonialization and modernization projects after World War II, it
has diffused around the world where it is more often referred
to as peasant studies, development studies, or village studies
instead of rural sociology (Newby, 1980). Additionally, many
of the foci of rural sociology are related closely to other social
science disciplines including cultural geography, social an-
thropology, and agricultural economics.
The Roots of American Rural Sociology
Although the field of rural sociology has made major strides in
understanding rural social processes, like the parent discipline
of sociology, it still has strong roots in the nineteenth-century
social thought. A central concern of nineteenth-century the-
orists was whether village and farm life was morally and so-
cially superior to metropolitan life, and whether rural life
would be resilient in the face of urban industrialism. Informed
by the Enlightenment and Western rationalism, the classical
sociologists Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Karl Marx
(1818–83) both argued that urban–industrial capitalism and
modern technologies and organizational practices were un-
avoidable and progressive social forces would eventually
supplant the residual remnants of backward, preindustrial
rural social forms. In contrast, Ferdinand Töennies
62 Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Volume 5
Rural–urban continuum Notion that the nature of social
structure, social relationships, and values vary systematically
across rural and urban communities.
Sociology of agricultural science Study of the process
through which scientists and scientific institutions discover
new knowledge.
Sociology of agrifood studies Study of the sociology of
agriculture and food that links agricultural production and
food consumption to globalization and commodity
systems.
(1855–1936) viewed urbanization and industrial capitalism
that characterized gesellschaft societies as leading to the de-
cline of the pastoral virtues and intimate communal bonds of
rural gemeinschaft societies that are necessary for healthy so-
cial life. For Töennies and many early rural sociologists, the
cities and social relations of industrial capitalism represented
the degradation of civilization. Although Max Weber (1864–
1920) recognized the dynamism of the social forces of bur-
eaucratization, industrialization, and urbanization that were
marginalizing traditional rural societies, he thought that bur-
eaucratization and the industrial revolution, which he referred
to as an iron cage, would lead to social movements, political
ideologies, and other forms of resistance to these forces of
rationalization and uniformity.
Throughout its history, rural sociology has engaged in these
nineteenth-century debates over the desirability and resilience
of traditional rural social organization. Two general positions
have alternated over time and still exist: (1) the view that rural
society, owing to its more intimate social bonds, lower inci-
dence of social pathologies, and stronger religious institutions,
is socially and morally superior to urban society and therefore
deserves to be preserved and (2) the view that traditional rural
beliefs, social structures, technologies, practices, and insti-
tutions are nostalgic anachronisms of the past and must be
modernized for the quality of rural life to be enhanced. Both
positions are embedded deeply in Western social thought and
continue to inform the discipline and discourses of rural
sociology.
The historical roots of rural sociology in America reside in
the economic, political, and economic transformation brought
about by the industrial revolution that occurred after the Civil
War. Though the surge of industrial capitalism brought afflu-
ence to many regions in the United States, it also created
poverty and inequality in many rural areas. A benchmark
publication in the debate between these two views of rural
society was Sorokin and Zimmerman’s (1929) Principles of
Rural–Urban Sociology, which synthesized rural sociological
thought of the time and was the summative treatise in the
field. Sorokin and Zimmerman’s ‘rural–urban continuum’
perspective drew primarily on Töennies’ analysis of how
doi:10.1016/B978-0-444-52512-3.00253-9
 Author's personal copy
urbanization and industrial capitalism led to the undermining
of the primary social bonds of community. Accordingly, the
rural sociology research carried out before World War II was
largely devoted to rural community studies and tended to
present rural life as socially richer and morally superior to
urban life.
Agrarian Politics and the Country Life Commission
America’s agrarian politics also significantly shaped the tra-
jectory of rural sociology. Though the term ‘rural sociology’
was not widely used until the 1920s, the first American rural
sociological studies were conducted in the 1890s during a
decade of populism and agrarian unrest. These pioneering
rural sociological studies were initiated by DuBois (1898), a
black sociologist on the staff of the US Department of Labor.
DuBois’ studies emphasized how the postbellum crop-lien
system in southern plantation agriculture reinforced black
poverty by tying black farmers to the plantation system and
subordinating them to the power of the planter class. During
this time, studies of agricultural communities in the northeast
were also undertaken by F.H. Giddings and associates at
Columbia University. In these early days, land grant uni-
versities had little or no presence in the scholarship now called
rural sociology.
Although the populist critique of industrial capitalism
swept through much of rural America during these years,
populism did not directly influence early rural sociology.
During the first full decade of American sociology, there was
widespread suspicion among university administrators and
their patrons that sociology should be scrutinized to ensure
that it concerned itself with empirical research rather than
populist politics. This political environment led most soci-
ologists to distance themselves from radical social theories and
movements. There is no indication that any American rural
sociologists were active supporters of populism.
Populism’s indirect influences on rural sociology, however,
were important. The populists’ mostly unsuccessful attempts
to recruit black farmers into their movement contributed to
the questioning of the sharecropping system, the structure of
agriculture, and southern rural social structure. Populist rad-
icalism was a major source of concern to urban industrialists
who benefited from a socioeconomic system that provided a
stable supply of cheap food for their workers. Although Wil-
liam Jennings Bryant’s loss in the 1898 presidential election
signaled the defeat of populism in electoral politics, fear of a
resurgence of populist radicalism remained for more than a
decade.
The aim of providing a moderate alternative to populism
was integral to the establishment of the Country Life Movement
(Danbom, 1979). Founded by industrial and other elites, the
Country Life Movement maintained that, contrary to populist
assertions, rural social problems were not owing to the negative
impacts of industrial capitalism, but rather because of a lack of
organization, poor infrastructure, and technological backward-
ness in rural areas. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt rec-
ognized this reform movement by appointing a Presidential
Commission on County Life, chaired by Liberty Hyde Bailey,
dean of Agriculture at Cornell University. The next six decades
Rural Sociology 63
of American rural sociology were framed by the Country Life
Commission Report published in 1909. The report did ac-
knowledge many of the social problems of rural America (e.g.,
the inequities of the crop-lien system and widespread share-
cropping), but its dominant message was that an expanded
effort to modernize rural America technologically and socially
was integral to improving rural society. The Country Life
Commission recommended the establishment of what is now
called the Cooperative Extension Service to speed the modern-
ization of rural America. The Cooperative Extension Service
(Smith–Lever Act of 1914) completed the land grant college
modernization triangle of teaching (Morrell Act of 1862) and
research (Hatch Act of 1887).
The Country Life Commission recommended the harness-
ing of the social sciences, particularly agricultural economics
and rural sociology, to support the technological modern-
ization of rural America. Rural sociological studies in land
grant colleges of agriculture were critical in helping to remove
social barriers to technological modernization and stabilize
rural communities. The establishment of rural sociology,
however, was slow and uneven, particularly compared with
the field of agricultural economics. Only a few land grant
colleges – generally the larger ones in the Northeast and
Midwest – established major rural sociology programs.
Moreover, it was not until the Purnell Act of 1925 that federal
funds were available to support rural sociological research. For
all practical purposes, the land grant colleges where rural
sociology was present in the 1930s are the same 25 or so
institutions where rural sociology existed in the early 1990s.
Institutionalizing Rural Sociology
Three other historical factors were crucial in shaping and in-
stitutionalizing rural sociology. First, the Great Depression and
the New Deal opened up vast opportunities for rural socio-
logical scholarship aimed at rural reform and relief. By the
mid-1930s, sociologists in the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE)
and other federal agencies had carried out an impressive pro-
gram of empirical research on rural communities, rural
population, and the structure of agriculture and had linked
this research with an agenda for far-reaching rural reforms
(e.g., reduction of the power of southern landlords, land
tenure reform, and encouragement of cooperative forms of
production). Second, the course of rural sociology was de-
cisively shaped when in 1936–1937 rural sociologists broke
from the American Sociological Society (later the American
Sociological Association) to establish the Rural Sociological
Society and started their own journal Rural Sociology. The or-
ganizational break from the larger discipline of sociology led
rural sociology to become even more identified with and in-
stitutionalized within the land grant and USDA complex.
Third, from the late-1930s through the mid-1940s the pro-
gressive reformism of the New Deal came under attack by
conservative members of the Congress. The crackdown on re-
formist rural sociology (and agricultural economics) was
completed when the BAE was disbanded in 1944. Seminal
works on the relationship between the structure of agriculture
and quality of life in rural areas carried out by Goldschmidt
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64 Rural Sociology
(1947) working for the BAE were suppressed. For two decades
after the dismantlement of the BAE, the new generations of
rural sociologists were dissuaded from embracing the scholarly
and political reform orientations of the New Deal rural soci-
ologists. They were encouraged to embrace positivist social
science and provide the basic descriptive information about
rural people and rural society to help inform policies targeted
to rural modernization.
As a result of these changes, the Töennies–Sorokin–
Zimmerman perspective of the rural–urban continuum that
favored rural over urban social forms declined in prominence
as rural sociology was confronted with the Great Depression
and rural squalor, and quickly embraced New Deal reformism.
During the New Deal period, rural sociology adopted the
modernist view that rural society needed the types of legal,
social, and structural reforms that were underway in nonrural
arenas, such as labor relations, state regulation of economy
and society, old age assistance, and so on. This perspective
questioned the romantic and nostalgic position that the
traditional structures and practices of rural society were
necessarily socially desirable. The rural–urban continuum
perspective was also undermined empirically by studies
showing that community-like primary social bonds persist
even within large metropolitan places.
Rural sociology is a disciplinary product of these historical
events interpreted from the two contradictory views of rural
society grounded in social theory. The institutional separation
from the parent discipline of sociology, the institutional
housing of rural sociology programs in colleges of agriculture,
and the structural linkages to the Extension Service shifted
rural sociology from its original focus on preserving rural life
in the face of industrial capitalism to facilitating technologi-
cally driven modernization. To survive in the institutional
environment of the times, rural sociology embraced its func-
tion within the land grant college system by facilitating the
modernization of rural society. As politicians and college of
agriculture administrators pushed rural sociology to be useful
in solving the practical problems of rural society, it lost its
preservationist agenda informed by critical social theories.
Research that contradicted the prevailing modernist agenda
might threaten its institutional standing. By the 1940s, the
function and practice of rural sociology was clear, to explicitly
support the social policy of transforming rural society through
enhanced adoption of modern technologies (Newby, 1980).
Modernist and Preservationist Perspectives
The modernist perspective dominated until the 1960s when
rural sociologists and rural advocates began to document and
criticize the negative impacts of unquestioned technological
adoption as the only path that improved the rural quality of
life. The rural–urban continuum perspective reappeared as
advocates of rural society renewed their search for ways to
preserve what they perceived to be the superior qualities of
rural life in the face of the continued spread of industrial
capitalism. Their concerns included community disintegration,
rural out-migration, loss of local autonomy, family-farm de-
cline, degradation of the rural landscape, and depletion of
natural resources. Rural protagonists were informed by the
Jeffersonian agrarian values of community, individualism,
family-based businesses, and grass-roots democracy (Gilbert,
1982). As noted at the outset of this article, American rural
sociology has oscillated between these polar views and agen-
das of (1) providing uncritical positivist science in support of
modernizing backward remnants of preindustrial societies and
(2) preserving the special aspects of rural society that support
community well-being and enhanced quality of life. Many
politicians, land grant university administrators, and advocates
of technological innovations still view the preservationist
agenda as a major barrier to progress for rural societies.
Though rural sociological research, teaching, and outreach
are now undertaken in many nations with rural sociology
professional societies on all continents, rural sociology is es-
sentially an American phenomenon. The disciplinary category
‘rural sociology’ was created in association with the American
land grant university system and even today most professional
rural sociologists in the United States are still university faculty
appointed in land grant colleges of agriculture. The land grant
university system was created by the federal government to
modernize agriculture and rural life. Though many other
countries have a tradition of scholarship similar to rural
sociology, the global spread of rural sociology was due mainly
to the missionary zeal of rural sociologists from the 1940s
through the 1960s, who embraced the modernization per-
spective. Mostly funded through the rapid expansion of
American foreign aid in the post-World War II period, many
famous American rural sociologists traveled extensively and
diffused American-style rural sociology across a wide range of
countries, often helping to create land grant-style systems. As
late as the 1960s, rural sociology in other countries was very
similar to the American variety.
Beginning in the 1970s, rural sociology became increasingly
diverse. Today US rural sociology is not nearly so homogeneous
or globally influential as it once was but increasingly borrows
from the ideas of European and developing world scholars.
Although the modernization perspective is still prominent, the
reengagement with critical perspectives has expanded as posi-
tivist interpretations were found lacking in explaining social
change. Continental and regional professional rural sociology
societies, such as the Latin American Rural Sociological Associ-
ation, European Society for Rural Sociology, Australia and
Oceana Network, and Asia Rural Sociological Association as
well as the International Rural Sociological Association have
expanded. Rural sociologists are active in many of the research
committees of the International Sociological Association. The
dominance of the land grant university model in the United
States has also waned. Owing to a combination of budget cuts,
mission redefinition, and academic reorganizations, during the
last two decades several rural sociology programs at land grant
universities have closed or merged into broader social science
programs. As a result, rural sociologists are increasingly em-
ployed in non-land grant university settings in the public and
private sectors.
The Major Foci of Rural Sociology
Modern rural sociology has six major branches of study: rural
population, rural community, rural social stratification,
 Author's personal copy
natural resources and environment, agriculture and food, and
science and technology. Following the dichotomous pattern
presented in the Section Modernist and Preservationist Per-
spectives, some branches of study emerged and developed
during the historical periods dominated by modernist per-
spectives and other branches during times informed by critical
perspectives. In this article, principal attention is given to sci-
ence and technology and agriculture and food. Before doing
so, a brief description of each of the major specialties in
American rural sociology is provided. This section concludes
with a discussion on international rural sociology.
Population and Community
From the inception of rural sociology, sociological analysis of
rural population and rural community dynamics through
census and social survey data has been central to the field.
DuBois’ early work on black farming was largely based on
population census data. As will be dealt in more depth later,
the overarching frame of all early rural sociological research is
the sociology of agriculture. Patterns of farming systems were
studied to try to better understand the relationship between
types of farming operations and quality of life in rural areas.
Recall that DuBois’ early work was on the implications of the
Black tenant sharecroppers and planter landlords system of
agriculture in the south. The methodology of these early
studies was usually the community survey, which cemented
the overlap between population and community studies. The
Country Life Commission report noted the lack of and need
for complete and accurate information regarding the con-
ditions of rural life. The work of the Division of Farm Popu-
lation and Rural Life of the BAE provided basic descriptive data
about the rural population and established rural population
studies as one of the pillars of the field. These early descriptive
studies generated typologies of farming systems that were used
to inform modernization programs carried out by the Co-
operative Extension Service, which had an office in nearly
every rural county in the United States. Major rural sociology
programs included a specialist in rural population and rural
community studies who analyzed census data for counties and
rural places. Population studies still provide the important
basic descriptive information used to inform the policies and
programs designed to modernize rural society (Garkovich,
1989).
Rural population and community studies have become
increasingly differentiated so that they are now seen as distinct
specialties. Rural population research has followed dem-
ography in becoming more quantitative and descriptive.
Studies that have moved past description into more socio-
logical investigations tended to be guided by the human
ecology perspective (Hawley, 1950). Although Hawley’s sys-
tems model does incorporate the interplay between popu-
lation, organization, environment, and technology variables
and therefore allows for a more sophisticated evaluation than
the empirical description of demography, its ability to inte-
grate the spatial with the social aspects of rural society is
limited. As population studies and demography generated a
wealth of data on both rural and urban populations, it became
possible to conduct statistical comparisons between the two
Rural Sociology 65
groups and thereby test some of the preservationist prop-
ositions that population size and density influence social ac-
tions and organization; the greater the size and density the
lower the social cohesion and quality of life. As noted in the
Section The Roots of American Rural Sociology, this frame was
first conceptualized as the Töennies–Sorokin–Zimmerman
rural–urban continuum and later as the ‘folk-urban con-
tinuum’ (Redfield, 1947). The evidence of a linear relationship
that shows decreased quality of life associated with increased
population size and density has been mixed. Gemeinschaft
relationships were discovered surviving within gesellschaft
communities. As a result, the use of census data to document
rural–urban differences has been discarded by most rural
sociologists.
The rural sociological analysis of communities can be
traced back to Galpin’s (1915, 1918) pioneering holistic
community studies. Galpin is known as the founder of rural
sociology. At the University of Wisconsin, Galpin initiated
rural life studies based on community studies. His study titled
‘The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community’ was the
first Experimental Station bulletin in rural sociology. Galpin
was also very active in the American Country Life Association,
and later headed the Division of Farm Population and Rural
Life in the BAE/USDA. Rural sociologists have conducted
thousands of community studies in support of community
developed policies and programs (Summers, 1986; Wilkinson,
1991).
By the 1960s, the criticisms of the rural–urban continuum
approach for being weak methodologically and excessively
descriptive had solidified (Bell and Newby, 1972). Com-
munity studies suffered from the advance of the mass-society
thesis, which argued that local communities have been
eclipsed by the macrosystem forces of industrialization, ur-
banization, and bureaucratization (Stein, 1964). Through in-
creased vertical linkages, extralocal forces overwhelmed the
horizontal linkages of local communities and rendered small
rural communities powerless (Warren, 1963). Later research
found that increased vertical linkages do not necessarily des-
troy horizontal linkages, which tempered the macrosystem
dominance thesis (Summers, 1986). Much of the community
studies work done today employs either the social capital
perspective (Flora and Flora, 2008) or the interactional field
perspective (Wilkinson, 1991).
Social Stratification
Throughout human history, there has been a tendency for
poverty, disadvantage, and political subordination to be ex-
hibited disproportionately among rural people. Preindustrial
rural social structures (e.g., feudalism, the antebellum and
postbellum Southern plantation systems in the United States,
landlord-dominated rural economies in much of South and
Southeast Asia, and the latifundia–minifundia complex of
Latin America) tended to generate social inequality. In modern
societies, rural people have tended to be poorer than urban
people. The equation of rural with poverty and inequality has
made analyses of rural social stratification and inequality an
important dimension of rural sociology. The substantive area
of rural social stratification has a long and controversial history
 Author's personal copy
66 Rural Sociology
in rural sociology. DuBois’ work on tenancy in the south
revealed patterns of race-based institutional discrimination.
Populist concerns over the power of the agribusiness trusts
triggered a broad-based social movement critical of the impact
of industrial capitalism on rural society. Cognizant of these
expressed concerns regarding inequality, administrators of
turn-of-the-century universities steered sociological attention
away from controversial class and other inequalities and
toward perspectives, such as population analysis and the
rural–urban continuum. Thirty years later the New Deal cli-
mate of state-led reformism created space for rural sociological
attention to social class, race, and poverty, though this space
shrank as the New Deal was rolled back, the BAE was dis-
mantled, and Cold War intensified.
Rural social stratification and related analyses enjoyed a
renaissance during the Great Society Era and War on Poverty in
the 1960s. The study of rural social stratification continues to
be a lively and increasingly more diversified arena of inquiry.
Studies of regional and labor market inequalities, rural gender
inequality, and rural racial inequality have enriched the an-
alysis of rural social inequality (Lobao et al., 2007). These
analyses have been extended to the global level and to met-
ropolitan-corporate forces, such as international competition
among private multinational agricultural input firms as part of
the globalization of economy and society (Bonanno et al.,
1994; McMichael, 1994).
In the 1980s, rural labor market studies emerged to analyze
the changing economic base and employment opportunities
in rural America. Modernization and mechanization of agri-
culture and other extractive natural resource-based industries
supported the steady decline of employment in the primary
sector of the economy. From the modernization perspective,
rural to urban migration was a natural outcome of the effi-
ciencies gained when capital replaced labor. In the 1970s, rural
areas experienced a manufacturing boom as industries mi-
grated south from the rust belt in search of cheaper land, lower
taxes, and nonunion workers. Although this trend continues as
major manufacturing companies shop for rural locations to
site their operations, service industries have emerged as the
major source of employment growth. These shifts have con-
tributed to uneven employment opportunities, high un-
employment in many rural regions, the growth of temporary,
part-time, and informal work, and often increases in poverty.
Much of the research investigates the nature and extent of rural
unemployment and underemployment, with a growing focus
on the linkages of rural labor markets to the macroprocesses of
national economic restructuring as part of the globalization of
economy and society (Green, 2007; Tigges and Tootle, 1990).
Gender studies in rural sociology received little attention
until the late twentieth century (Haney and Knowles, 1988).
Since then numerous studies have been carried out that in-
vestigate how the institutions of capitalism and patriarchy
influence the work roles of men and women in the home, on
the farm, and in other rural labor markets. A major dimension
of these studies is the nature of farm women’s household,
farm, and off-farm work (Sachs, 1996). Recent research has
revealed the hidden and mostly unreported contributions of
women to rural sociology (Zimmerman and Larson, 2010).
Gender studies have also started to focus on the topic of farm
men and issues of masculinity (Campbell et al., 2006).
Natural Resources and Environment
There is an established tradition of rural sociological scholar-
ship on the relations between people, communities, and natural
resources. This scholarship is divided theoretically and meth-
odologically into the sociology of natural resources (SNR) and
environmental sociology (ES) camps (Buttel, 2002). These
camps mostly followed the two perspectives noted in the Sec-
tion Modernist and Preservationist Perspectives. The SNR camp
is grounded in early twentieth-century discussions regarding
conservationist (forester Gifford Pinchot) versus preservationist
(ecologist John Muir) views of natural resources. It focuses on
conservationist approaches regarding efficient management of
nonrenewable and renewable resources with a strong applied
and empirical orientation (Field and Burch, 1988). By the
1960s, the SNR was an established research area made up of a
combination of (1) social scientists employed in government
natural resource management agencies, such as the US Park
Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and
Corps of Engineers; (2) scholars working in the areas of leisure
and recreation studies; and (3) rural sociologists working on
resource-dependent community issues, such as the boomtown
phenomenon of mining and forestry communities. In the
1970s, the field expanded to include the area of social impact
assessment. Most SNR researchers are employed in private or
public resource management agencies or natural resource-
related academic departments, such as forestry, wildlife and
range management, fisheries, or international development.
SNR researchers are often members of the International Sym-
posium on Society and Resource Management and publish in
the flagship journal, Society and Natural Resources.
The substantive area of ES emerged in the 1960s and 1970s
as part of the environmental movement (Buttel, 2002). Most
early environmental sociologists were academics at liberal arts
institutions with a substantive interest in environmentalism.
Although some of the environmental sociologists had back-
grounds in natural resource sociology and then expanded their
research arena as environmental externalities and concerns
manifested in the 1960s, most were younger academics with a
strong commitment to environmentalism. The original re-
search questions focused on the characteristics of environ-
mentalism and the structure of the environmental movement,
then expanded to the areas of pollution and resource scarcity
owing to industrial production and consumption (Bell, 1998;
Buttel, 1978; Catton and Dunlap, 1978; Schnaiberg and
Gould, 1994).
ES approaches tend to be more critical and address the
‘Environmental Question’ regarding the relationship between
modern agriculture and environmental quality. More radical
neo-Marxist interpretations (O’Connor, 1998) argue that
capitalism is inherently contradictory with ecological sustain-
ability, whereas less radical perspectives such as reflexive
modernization (Beck, 1992) support reformist agendas such as
green technologies. In the past two decades, the field of pol-
itical ecology, mostly advanced by critical geographers and
development social scientists, emerged as a complement to ES
(Peet and Watts, 1996). Rural sociology was at the leading
edge of the larger subdiscipline of ES and continues to provide
strong leadership in applied areas of ES (Freudenburg, 1986;
Dunlap et al., 2002).
 Author's personal copy
International Rural Sociology
As noted earlier, many of the prominent American rural soci-
ologists of the post-World War II period encouraged the global
diffusion of rural sociology, particularly in the developing
world. The impulse for diffusing international rural sociology
(or the sociology of development) was partly the desire to
promote a comparative approach to understanding rural social
organization, but more importantly the post-War period was
an emerging era of ‘developmentalism,’ based on a faith in the
efficacy of scientifically planned social change and technolo-
gical development in the decolonizing world. Rural soci-
ologists thought they had a great deal to offer for improving
the quality of life in the developing world. Rural sociologists
trained in the adoption and diffusion of agricultural technol-
ogy (see Section Rural Sociology and the Diffusion Era) were
well represented among these early international rural soci-
ologists. The Cold War dynamic accelerated the push to diffuse
the technological answer to hunger and development and
combat the spread of communism. Food aid such as PL480
was a major dimension of these development assistance pro-
grams. Modernizationist interpretations of PL480 viewed it as
improving the Third World’s diets, whereas critical interpret-
ations viewed it as neocolonialism and cultural imperialism of
Western diets (McMichael, 1996).
This modernizationist/developmentalist tradition of rural
sociology held firm for nearly three decades, but ultimately
was displaced intellectually by critiques for its lack of efficacy
and of having ignored how development is constrained and
blocked by the global and national dynamics of the inter-
national political economy, as well as the ethnocentrist im-
position of one culture upon another. This early tradition of
international rural sociology would be undermined, in par-
ticular, through critical assessments by rural sociologists re-
garding their participation and the role of rural sociology in
the Green Revolution (Flora, 1990; Havens and Flinn, 1975).
The sociology of international rural development has
contributed substantially to the development of rural soci-
ology as a whole. International rural sociological studies have
helped to temper the tendency for this discipline embedded in
the land grant system to become parochial. International rural
sociology scholarship has also contributed to important the-
oretical trends in the field. For example, the late 1970s is re-
garded as a period of ascendance of the ‘New Rural Sociology,’
whose principal theoretical underpinnings were grounded in
the critique of international development programs and the
role of developmentalist/modernizationist rural sociology in
contributing to these programs (Buttle and Newby, 1980).
This critical literature became known as the dependency theory
(dependista) critique (Gunder Frank, 1969; Wallerstein, 1974)
of the great modernization project (Parsons, 1966; Rostow,
1960). In the 1990s, the Wageningen School (Long and Long,
1992; Van der Ploeg, 1992) introduced actor–network theory
(ANT) and a social anthropology approach to rural lifestyle
studies. ANT provided an interpretive alternative to political
economy perspectives, which dominated the New Rural Soci-
ology in the United States.
In the early 1990s, three major social forces combined to
alter the future of international rural sociology. First, land
grant universities faced with growing fiscal pressures cut their
Rural Sociology 67
international development program budgets. Second, a crisis
of confidence in the ability of development intervention pro-
grams, such as the World Bank (WB), the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and the US Agency for International
Development to make positive differences in the developing
world ensued as the global recession of the 1980s, inter-
national mobility of finance and industry linked to the glob-
alization of economy and society, and imposition of structural
adjustment programs on debtor countries threatened the
possibility of balanced growth in the developing world. The
1990s was the ‘postdevelopmentalist’ era in which the faith
that meaningful planned development based on positivist
approaches could occur waned as the harsh realities of glob-
alization and fiscal austerity associated with the late twentieth
century political economy became apparent. Third, the fiscal
crisis of the state combined with the demise of the USSR as a
global threat created a significant decline in the US develop-
ment assistance programs, which had traditionally been the
major source of funding for international development soci-
ology (McMichael, 1996).
Rural Sociology and the Diffusion Era
Embracing the adoption and diffusion of technology per-
spective was a pivotal turn in the development of rural soci-
ology (Fliegel, 1993). It dominated the rural sociological
scholarship during the 1950s and 1960s. Before this shift the
rural population, community studies, and rural–urban con-
tinuum traditions prevailed. Attention to technological change
had been confined to a few studies, such as Williams’ (1939)
work on the impact of the mechanization of cotton pro-
duction on field labor in the plantation systems of the south.
Even during the height of diffusion research in rural sociology,
the labor dislocations caused by mechanization of southern
agriculture led many rural sociologists in the region to ques-
tion the implications of new technologies.
The adoption–diffusion perspective is a social–psycho-
logical approach that explains why farmers adopt new tech-
nologies (Rogers, 1962). Farmers are social actors with
different cognitive states due to variation in education and
other factors and various value orientations, such as different
levels of modernity, innovativeness, and risk-taking. Farmers
respond to stimuli, such as the characteristics of new agri-
cultural technologies, mass media messages, and influences
from reference groups. Unlike the earlier traditions in which
community was stressed, the adoption–diffusion perspective
deemphasized the spatial aspect of rural society and focused
on particular psychological traits of individuals (Fliegel,
1993).
The rise of the adoption–diffusion perspective was an
outcome of many trends of the time. The rural–urban con-
tinuum perspective was exhausted and its role in data re-
connaissance to support New Deal reforms had waned. In the
1940s, there was much excitement about hybrid corn and the
pioneering adoption studies focused on this technology. It
identified which farmers had the highest rates of adoption of
hybrid corn and how the innovation was diffused to other
farmers. The social climate of the time was conducive to
shifting rural sociology to a focus on technologically driven
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68 Rural Sociology
modernization of rural society as the best path to improved
quality of life. Adoption–diffusion studies were also a strategic
way to make rural sociological research useful to experiment
station directors in the post-BAE climate. And in sociology at
large, the 1940s was a period of increased emphasis on social
psychology and survey research, which were integral to
adoption–diffusion research. Adoption–diffusion advocates
believed they had the answer to humanity’s ills and the sci-
entific method to diffuse the answer. In agriculture, the
promise was to end hunger and generate development.
The adoption tradition produced a number of general-
izations about the process of agricultural technology diffusion.
For example, it was repeatedly found that plots of cumulative
adoption over time took the form of a logistical growth (or ‘S’)
curve where adoption by the innovators proceeded slowly,
then accelerated through the early and late adopters, then
decelerated again as some of the laggards finally adopted.
Earlier adopters of new technology tended to be younger, have
higher levels of education, and to have more ‘modern’ value
orientations than do later or nonadopters. Research also re-
vealed that correlations between farm size and farm household
wealth and adoption of new commercial innovations tended
to increase over time. Soon adoption–diffusion research
spread to other innovations and countries as part of the
modernization era (Fliegel, 1993).
Critics stressed that a shortcoming of adoption–diffusion
was that it viewed new technologies as unambiguous im-
provements. Farmers who did not adopt were referred to as
‘laggards.’ Adoption researchers seldom considered how tech-
nologies might affect the structure of agriculture or the en-
vironment. Despite the utility of the adoption–diffusion
perspective, its influence began to decline in the late 1960s and
early 1970s in tandem with a growing skepticism toward
modern agricultural technologies among sociologists and so-
ciety at large. Although adoption–diffusion research no longer
has the prominent position it once enjoyed, modified dif-
fusion theories and methodologies still enhance the under-
standing of the processes of technological change.
The New Rural Sociology
By the 1960s, the critique of positivist frameworks that sup-
ported the unquestioned adoption of technology as the
panacea for rural society was well established. Critical rural
sociologists were concerned that social theory and research
had been decoupled and that the uncritical empiricism of
adoption–diffusion approaches generated unacceptable ex-
ternalities for rural environments and rural people. Several
rural sociologists with experience in adoption–diffusion pro-
grams internationally challenged the Western orthodoxy of the
technological panacea by arguing that modernization served
the interests of the wealthy elites and business interests to the
detriment of peasants and poor people (Havens, 1972). In
North America and Europe similar discontents emerged as
social movements claimed that environmental degradation
and institutional discrimination persisted. The normative and
positivist conceptual frameworks that dominated for the pre-
vious 20 years could not explain the social unrest of the time.
Rural social scientists turned to critical perspectives to better
explain why the public policies and programs of the federally
sponsored land grant university system which claimed to be
improving the quality of life for rural people was working well
for some groups but marginalizing other groups. This shift in
theoretical focus generated what is called The New Rural
Sociology (Buttle and Newby, 1980).
It was noted at the outset of this article that rural sociology’s
history has been one of alternating between opposing views
regarding the distinctiveness of traditional rural social struc-
tures. Rural sociology came into its own during the post-World
War II era. Post-War rural sociology tended to reject the rural
romanticism of the 1920s and embraced the technological-
modernizationist paradigm that traditional rural social struc-
tures were destined to disappear, that there was nothing
intrinsic to rural America that was sufficiently socially or mor-
ally superior to make it worthy of preservation, and that tech-
nological modernization was the most desirable future for rural
America. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the pendulum began to
swing back toward the rural preservationist perspective. Emer-
ging controversies over agricultural technologies and their social
and environmental impacts tarnished the luster from the tech-
nological-modernizationist view. The 1970s were a period of
‘rural renaissance’ because of metro-to-nonmetro migration and
a stabilization of the declines in farm numbers that character-
ized the post-War period.
The New Rural Sociology that emerged during the 1970s
and 1980s was decisively shaped by several phenomena in the
larger society. Five interrelated social movements are note-
worthy: Hightower’s (1973) critique of the land grant uni-
versity system linked to mechanization technologies; the
1970s critique of the Green Revolution; public resistance to
the rise of biotechnology in the 1980s; the sustainable agri-
culture movement in the 1980s; and the rise of global en-
vironmentalism in the 1980s. Social scientists placed emphasis
on explaining the origins of these movements and how they
shaped research policies and the content of new technologies.
Most importantly, disagreements over new technologies in
society at large prompted social scientists to ponder whether
there are intellectually rigorous and socially constructive ways
to take a neutral and detached position toward the practice of
science and the development of new technologies.
These new realities of rural America combined with the
growing popularity in sociology of critical theories led to the
New Rural Sociology. Adoption–diffusion approaches groun-
ded in positivistic assumptions of social change did not
explain well the societal conflict in the times. These new theo-
ries ranged from various forms of neo-Marxism and neo-
Weberianism to critical theories drawn from hermeneutics and
related traditions. The coherence among these theories was
their common critique of modernizationist rural sociology.
The dominant theoretical underpinning of the New Rural
Sociology drew heavily on neo-Marxist interpretations of the
social differentiation in agriculture, including the central role
of the state and powerful interest groups in maintaining the
political-economic system. The farm/debt crisis of the 1980s
provided the empirical setting to apply the New Rural Soci-
ology framework. ‘Save the Family Farm’ was a familiar rally-
ing cry for populist movements, such as Prairie Fire, the
American Agriculture Movement, the Center for Rural Affairs
(CRA, 2013), and the National Farmers’ Union (NFU, 2013).
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The critical New Rural Sociology first focused on the
paradox of the persistence of a majority of small family-based
producers that produced a small percentage of farm output
combined with the growth of large, capitalist operations that
accounted for large shares of production. The ‘Agrarian
Question’ was rediscovered as rural sociologists asked, ‘What is
the relationship between the structure of agriculture and the
quality of life in rural communities?’ Goldschmidt’s (1947)
work from California on the negative relationship between
community quality of life and industrial agriculture was re-
discovered. The early discussions centered on how capitalist
relations of production penetrated agriculture, including the
barriers to agricultural industrialization. The sociology of
agriculture emerged as a distinct substantive area within rural
sociology (Buttel et al., 1990).
At the international level, the New Rural Sociology repre-
sented a major shift away from positivist adoption–diffusion
approaches to critical world systems and dependency con-
ceptual frames. Much of the critique of adoption–diffusion
came from those international rural social scientists who did
research in the developing world and who realized its faults as
a tool for understanding agricultural change in rural areas
(Havens and Flinn, 1975; George, 1976; Lipton, 1977). Dis-
cussion centered on terms, such as Gunde Frank’s (1969) ‘the
development of underdevelopment’ and Wallerstein’s (1974)
‘world system’ of core, semiperiphery, and periphery counties
structured in unequal exchange relationships as a remnant of
colonialism. In the 1990s, the New Rural Sociology combined
the domestic and international foci to incorporate commodity
systems (Friedland, 1984) and commodity chain analysis
(Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1986), which documented the
political-economic dimensions of globalization of agriculture
and food systems (Bonanno et al., 1994; McMichael, 1994;
Goodman and Watts, 1997). Though the New Rural Sociology
was most prominent in the sociology of agriculture literature
(see Section Sociology of Agriculture and Food Studies), it had
a major influence on the rural sociological study of agricultural
science and technology as well.
The Sociology of Agricultural Science
In the post-Hightower period rural sociologists were unable to
develop a distinctly sociological theory of technological
change, so they build upon the ‘treadmill of technology’
concept from agricultural economist Cochrane (1979). Pro-
ceeding from an adoption–diffusion perspective, Cochrane’s
theory noted that earlier adopters received innovator’s rents
because of increased production combined with lower per unit
production costs. However, because new technologies increase
production and agricultural commodities have low price and
income elasticities of demand, overproduction and declining
commodity prices ensue. Depressed prices negate innovator’s
rent and force nonadopters to adopt, get on the treadmill, or
go out of business. Nonadopter’s lands were then consolidated
into the early adopter’s operations (cannibalism), increasing
farm size. Cochrane commented that the treadmill was sub-
sidized by government commodity programs, which placed a
floor under commodity prices. These subsidies caused the
Rural Sociology 69
benefits of new technologies to become capitalized in the farm
asset values of the surviving large landowners.
Rural sociologists appropriated Cochrane’s account of
technological change but soon found it to be lacking for a
number of reasons. The treadmill theory is more valid when
analyzing family farming systems compared with large-scale
industrial agriculture. It also exaggerates the structural nature
of technological change in family-farm agricultures. As most
family farmers have significant off-farm work, they have more
autonomy concerning adoption decisions. The technology
treadmill perspective’s focus on mechanization technology
applied better to the 1950s than the 1980s agriculture. Fur-
thermore, treadmill of technology reasoning does not address
the origins of new technologies, a limitation that was ad-
dressed by the development of a rural sociology of agricultural
science.
As noted in the Section Agrarian Politics and the Country
Life Commission, there were significant studies of technolo-
gical change and labor displacement in southern plantation
agriculture. The sociological study of the diffusion of agri-
cultural innovations began during World War II. Until the late
1960s, the adoption–diffusion perspective was the most im-
portant area of rural sociological research. However, the dif-
fusion tradition tended to ignore the social origins of science
and technology and the social consequences of technology.
The functionalist assumptions of adoption–diffusion ap-
proaches minimized the political–economic dimension of
rural sociological research. Serious study of the processes by
which agricultural science is practiced and new agricultural
technologies are developed did not emerge until Lawrence
Busch and William Lacy began to draw from the sociology of
science to develop the field of the sociology of agricultural
science. During the 1980s, a prominent group of rural
sociologists, including Busch and Lacy (1983), Friedland
(Friedland et al., 1981), Geisler (Berardi and Geisler, 1984),
and others created the sociological study of the social con-
sequences of agricultural technology.
An important breakthrough in rural sociological thought
occurred when Busch and Lacy grappled with how rural soci-
ology could meaningfully engage public debates over agri-
cultural research and technology. They recognized that
critiques of technology needed to demonstrate that there are
meaningful technological alternatives and that a change in the
structure of research institutions or research policy can affect
the content and impacts of new technology. To understand
whether there are alternatives to existing or emerging tech-
nologies, science and research needs to be studied rather than
just the social impacts of technology. Busch and Lacy pion-
eered the field of the sociology of agricultural science with
their theoretical critique of the implicit sociology of science
and knowledge within the adoption–diffusion tradition and
the application of the sociological theory of influence on the
research of agricultural scientists. Their seminal book, Science,
Agriculture, and the Politics of Research (Busch and Lacy,
1983), demonstrated the important impacts that scientists’
social backgrounds (e.g., farm vs. nonfarm) and institutional
nexus (State Agricultural Experiment Stations vs. Agricultural
Research Service) have on the research goals of scientists. It
documented the fact that science is a social product, and that
social factors help to determine which of the several alternative
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70 Rural Sociology
priorities and approaches are stressed in scientific institutions.
Their work provided a way for rural sociology to find some
middle ground between unrealistic Hightower-style criticism
of new technology on one hand, and uncompromising
defense of land grant technology on the other. They contrib-
uted to a better understanding of how land grant and other
public agricultural research institutions function and helped to
galvanize rural sociological interest in contributing to public
research policy.
It is notable that their work coincided with the growing
interest in the conflict over agricultural biotechnology. They
provided a general theoretical and empirical template for the
numerous studies that would be done to explain the course of
the development of agricultural biotechnology. Their own
book on biotechnology provides an innovative theoretical
position, which combines the insights of ANT from the soci-
ology of science and induced innovation theory from eco-
nomics (Busch et al., 1991). Busch’s work became increasingly
informed by science and technology studies (Latour, 1987),
which investigates the study of how science is made rather
than the finished science. These interests led to his creation of
the Michigan State University School of Agrifood Governance
and Technoscience (Konefal and Hatanaka, 2010), where his
students carried on this research agenda focusing on the sci-
entific production of standards and resulting societal govern-
ance by standards. Following the ANT framework, standards
are nonhuman actors that structure society in nondemocratic
ways. Busch continues to be concerned with the negative im-
pacts that scientism, statism, and marketism have for sub-
stantive forms of democracy (Busch, 2000, 2011).
Rural sociological studies of biotechnology are wide ran-
ging. Some of these were aimed at placing modern bio-
technology in a historical context of the changing division of
labor between the state and private capital in developing and
promoting new technology. Other scholars have stressed the
new political–economic environment of biotechnology (e.g.,
new intellectual property restrictions, such as patents), the
importance of intellectual competition in biotechnology, and
how modern biotechnology could be expected to alter the
dynamics of agrarian change in developed and developing
countries (Buttel, 2005; Goodman et al., 1987; Kloppenburg,
1988). The fierce controversy over GMO (genetically modified
organism) food is a good example of the continuing tension
between positivist and critical theoretical positions of the
implications of agricultural technology (see the movie Food
Inc. (Kenner, 2009)).
Rural sociologists have also pioneered in studies of several
areas of agricultural science other than biotechnology, such as
developing methodologies for ‘commodity systems analysis’
(Friedland, 1984). These studies have demonstrated that the
forces that shape public and private agricultural research are,
more often than not, relatively specific to the commodity
sector involved. Another important area of research has con-
cerned sustainable agriculture, which has included research
aimed at facilitating agricultural sustainability as well as re-
search on the origins and implications of the sustainable
agriculture movement (Allen, 2005; Buttel, 1997). The soci-
ology of agricultural science embraced a critical perspective to
study the social significance of the research apparatus of the
land grant university system itself, particularly as to whether it
has essentially served as a state policy that helped to under-
write the growth of large-scale capitalist agriculture (Rudy
et al., 2007).
Sociology of Agriculture and Food Studies
The sociology of agriculture and food is the dominant
substantive research area in rural sociology. As noted in the
Section Modernist and Preservationist Perspectives, all of
rural sociology can be contexted within the original concerns
with the relationship between the structure of agriculture and
the quality of life in rural communities. The New Rural
Sociology represented a significant critical departure from the
adoption–diffusion models that embraced positivist models
of development. The initial and central problematic of the
New Rural Sociology was the ‘Agrarian Question’ (Buttle and
Newby, 1980), which centered on the subsumption/survival
debate regarding how capitalism penetrates agriculture and
the degree of farmer/peasant integration into industrial
agricultural forms. National and international data not only
revealed a steady depeasantization of rural areas but also
showed that family-farm/peasant operations persisted in the
face of industrialization. Rural sociologists were interested in
whether family-farm/peasant agriculture would be subsumed
into industrial models or if and why it might survive. Three
perspectives emerged to explain this phenomenon: the sea-
sonal nature of agriculture and associated biological con-
straints created barriers to capitalist penetration (Mann,
1990); detours around these barriers, such as debt, contract
integration, market concentration, substitutionism, and
appropriationism provide other avenues of penetration
(Mooney, 1988; Goodman et al., 1987); and petty-
commodity producers survive through flexibility and self-
exploitation (Friedmann, 1978). The outcome of this debate
revealed that structuralist-Marxist interpretations of the
demise of family/peasant agriculture were flawed due to
particular configurations of family/peasant farming and that
historical and spatial contingencies created alternative struc-
tures of agriculture (Marsden, 1989).
In the 1990s, the sociology of agriculture and food ex-
perienced two significant shifts: agroindustrial globalization
and farming styles. The agroindustrial globalization approach
argues that the primary drivers of agricultural change reside
outside production agriculture and in the areas of national
political–economic processes, the global economy, and geo-
politics. In particular, the rising power of agribusiness trans-
national corporations (TNCs) and supranational forms of the
state (e.g., IMF, WB, World Trade Organization) as major co-
ordinators of the agrifood system became a crucial research
arena. Friedmann and McMichael (1989) introduced the re-
gimes approach from the French Regulationist School to in-
terpret broad historical shifts in global agricultural
arrangements. Regimes analysis looks at clusters of symbiotic
factors that generate stable periods of capital accumulation
interspersed with periods of crisis. The settler regime (Frontier)
of the late 1800s dominated by the British Empire was re-
placed in the 1940s by the agricultural surplus regime (For-
dist) dominated by the United States. Institutional crises of the
1970s prompted the end of the surplus regime and the nascent
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emergence of the neoliberal regime (Post-Fordism) based on
flexible accumulation strategies employed by TNCs who ex-
ercised global sourcing strategies to obtain the best factors of
production, often to the detriment of subordinate groups and
substantive forms of democracy (Bonanno and Constance,
2008; Burch and Lawrence, 2007; Campbell and Dixon, 2009;
Heffernan, 2000; Magdoff et al., 2000). The combination of
food regimes theory with commodity systems analysis
(Friedland, 1984) provided the terminology and framework
that informed agrifood theory in the 1990s. Critiques of the
neo-Marxist foundations of the agroindustrialization thesis
(Goodman and Watts, 1994) grounded in social constructivist
perspectives pushed agrifood theory beyond its structuralist
and pessimistic outlook. As a result of these events, the soci-
ology of agriculture expanded beyond production and the
farm gate to include the global dimensions of complex com-
modity systems that linked global producers and consumers in
shifting commodity chains.
The farming styles approach is often referred to as the
Wageningen School based at Wageningen University in the
Netherlands. The Wageningen School employs a neo-Weberian
actor-oriented approach, which criticizes both functionalist and
Marxist approaches for ignoring the relevance of social agency.
From this social constructivist view, diverse rural cultures
interact with diverse national environments and economies to
create diverse farming styles. This diversity of farming styles
based on locale-specific farming structures, technologies,
rationalities, and practices mitigate the homogenizing forces of
the globalization (Arce and Marsden, 1993; Long and Long,
1992; Van der Ploeg, 1992, 2009).
During the late 1990s, the ‘Food Question’ came to the fore
and the substantive research area became known as the soci-
ology of agrifood studies. The ‘Food Question’ investigates the
relationship between the modern agrifood system and the
quality of food. Commodity systems and globalization had
taken the research beyond the farm gate to include how con-
sumers were drivers of the agrifood system. Goodman’s
(2003) ‘quality turn’ captured the growing interest in alter-
native agrifood systems, such as food sheds (Kloppenburg
et al., 1996), regional food systems (Garrett and Feenstra,
1999), community-supported agriculture (DeLind, 2002),
slow food (Miele and Murdoch, 2002), organics (Guthman,
2004), civic agriculture (Lyson, 2004), appellations (Barham,
2007), and agriculture of the middle (Lyson et al., 2008).
The legitimation crisis regarding both the environmental
and socioeconomic externalities of conventional, chemical-
intensive, monoculture agriculture, such as poor nutrition,
obesity, Escherichia coli, Salmonella, pesticide contamination,
confined animal feeding operations, animal welfare, and sys-
tematic rural depopulation had reached critical mass (Wright
and Middendorf, 2008). Consumers were driving the agrifood
system toward quality instead of commodity foods and re-
searchers shifted their energies from the problems to the so-
lutions of the agrifood system (Hinrichs and Lyson, 2007; The
Meatrix (Fox and Sachs, 2003); Grocery Store Wars (Organic
Trade Association (OTA) (2005)); King Corn (Woolf et al.,
2007); 3 Lies About Food You’re Used to Hearing and Might
Even Believe (Food Mythbusters and Lappe, 2013); Super Size
Me (Spurlock, 2004); and Fast Food Nation (Schlosser,
2006)).
Rural Sociology 71
The newest focus of agrifood research addresses the
‘Emancipatory Question.’ It investigates the relationship be-
tween the structure of modern agriculture and the quality of
civil rights for all participants. More specifically, it asks what
kind of agrifood system might decrease injustice and in-
equality for farmers/ranchers/growers, farmworkers, food
processing workers, and all consumers? How can we transform
the agrifood system to be more socially, economically, and
environmentally just (Allen, 2005; Hinrichs and Lyson, 2007;
Thompson, 2010)? A central dimension of this research
has been the discussion of the different position producers
experience in commodity versus value chains. Commodity
chains tend to be based on indirect sales of undifferentiated
global commodities dominated by agribusiness TNCs, whereas
value chains tend to be based on value-added dimensions of
the chain (such as, organics) and attempts to share the
value more equitably. Fair trade (Fair Trade International,
2013; Raynolds et al., 2007) has emerged as an attempt to
shift some of the profits along the value chain upstream
toward the producers and avoid the power of the agribusiness
TNCs that drive the conventional commodity chains. Agri-
culture of the middle (Lyson et al., 2008) has emerged as
an attempt to provide opportunities for those midsized pro-
ducers who are too large for direct sales but too small to
compete in global commodity markets by creating identity-
preserved, value-added products. Food policy councils
(Winne, 2008) have emerged to bring all stakeholders to the
same table in an effort to create and sustain an equitable
agrifood system. At the international level, organizations, such
as La Via Campesina, are pushing back against the corporate
domination of the agrifood system, especially regarding GMO
foods, and arguing that food is a sovereign right (La Via
Campesina, 2013; Wittman et al., 2010). For many rural
sociologists, alternative agriculture movements are viewed as
the countervailing force to the corporate domination of the
global agrifood system based on neoliberal restructuring that
favors market-based governance over democratic institutions
(Morgan et al., 2006).
Summary
Rural sociology continues to be a diverse and vibrant field of
study. Professional rural sociological associations span the
globe. This article provides an overview of rural sociology with
particular attention paid to the substantive areas of the soci-
ology of agricultural science and the sociology of agrifood
studies (see RSS (2013) for other historical sources). The so-
cial, economic, and environmental implications of the glob-
alization of the agrifood system, including the alternative
responses to the dominant model, create a rich environment
for a long and interesting discourse in the field. A diverse array
of social scientists including rural sociologists, agricultural
economists, environmental sociologists, cultural geographers,
cultural anthropologists, nutritionists, and others bring their
particular disciplinary conceptual lenses to bear on the topic.
The Four Questions framework (Constance, 2008) – Agrarian,
Environmental, Food, and Emancipatory – spans disciplinary
boundaries and is useful for organizing the ongoing discourse.
Current issues, such as climate change, food sovereignty, land
 Author's personal copy
72 Rural Sociology
grabs, governance, and genetically modified food occupy the
cutting edge of new discourses. It is noteworthy that DuBois’
original concerns regarding sharecropping and contract pro-
duction are still salient today as agribusiness TNCs, in par-
ticular the dominant food retailers, create flexible commodity
chains based on global sourcing. Recent research on the
quality of life effects of industrial agriculture for rural people
provides evidence in support of the critical perspective (Lobao
and Stofferahn, 2008). Although the sociology of agrifood
studies currently dominates the field of rural sociology, the
historical foci of population and community studies, stratifi-
cation studies, natural resource sociology, ES, and agricultural
science studies continue to make theoretical and empirical
contributions within those subareas. Similarly, although today
the critical perspective enjoys some privilege over positivist
approaches, both continue to inform social policy agendas
and reflect divergent views of rural society. The issue of GMOs
captures this point well. Although advocates invoke an adop-
tion–diffusion perspective that presents GMOs as the answer
to world hunger, opponents criticize GMOs as yet another
example of industrial domination and marginalization of rural
peoples.
Disclaimer
This article is an update of the original article written by Buttel
(1994). The early sections of this article follow closely Buttel’s
original contribution and his later work (Summers and Buttel,
2000), whereas the later sections are informed by recent
developments in the field.
See also: Agricultural Ethics and Social Justice. Agricultural Labor:
Gender Issues. Agricultural Labor: Labor Market Operation.
Changing Structure and Organization of US Agriculture.
Ecoagriculture: Integrated Landscape Management for People, Food,
and Nature. Food Chain: Farm to Market. Global Food Supply
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