Books in the Rural Studies series

At the turn of the 20th century, the California dream was a suburban ideal where life on the farm was exceptional. Agrarian virtue existed alongside good roads, social clubs, cultural institutions, and business commerce. California Dreaminganalyses the growth, promotion, and agricultural colonization that fed this dream during the early 1900s.

Community leadership development programmes are designed to increase the capacity of citizens for civic engagement. This volume presents the results of a five-year study tracking community-level effects of community leadership development programs drawn from research conducted in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Asks whether revenue generated by wind power can be put to community well-being rather than corporate profit. Through case studies of a North Dakota wind energy cooperative and an investor-owned wind farm in Illinois, Keith Taylor examines how regulatory and social forces are shaping this emerging energy sector.

Employing original fieldwork, historical analysis, and sociological theory, Sekine and Bonanno probe how Japan's food and agriculture sectors have been shaped by the global push toward privatization and corporate power, known in the social science literature as neoliberalism. They also examine related changes that have occurred after the triple disaster of March 2011.

A collection of 11 papers on issues of representation, power and identity within the British countryside. The work reports on research in this area which has looked to groups who feel themselves to be marginalized or excluded from the dominant ideologies in the countryside.

Analyzes the reaction of existing and former socialist countries to neoliberalism. Examines economic transitions in agriculture and the reconfiguration of socialism in Russia, China, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

The 20th century was one of profound transformation in rural America, when demographic shifts and economic restructuring dramatically altered the lives of rural people and their communities. This work defines these changes and interprets their implications for the future of rural America.

Studies the rural labor processes and their national and international effects. This book examines the socioeconomic effects of the H-2 program on both the areas where the laborers work and the areas they are from, and, taking a uniquely humanitarian stance, considers the effects of the program on the laborers themselves.

Introduces the women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. This work explores such topics as social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation.

We see that masculinity is no less significant in rural life than in urban life. The essays in this volume offer insight into the myths and stereotypes, as well as the reality of the lives of rural men. Interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions investigate what it means to be a farming man, a logging man, or a boy growing up in a country town.