Books in the Rural Studies series

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.

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.

A compilation of policy-relevant research by a multidisciplinary group of scholars on the state of families in rural America in the twenty-first century. Examines the impact of economic restructuring on rural Americans and provides policy recommendations for addressing the challenges they face.

Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty examines welfare participants who live in chronically poor rural areas of the United States where there are few job opportunities and poor systems of education, transportation, and child care. Pickering looks at welfare reform in four rural and impoverished regions of the United States.

Based on interviews and years of close interaction with more than 60 Iowa farm families, Bell answers two critical questions concerning sustainable agriculture: why some farmers are becoming sustainable farmers and why, as yet, most are not.

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.

From 1919 through 1953, the U.S. Department of Agriculture housed the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life--the first unit within the federal government established specifically for sociological research. Distinguished sociologists Charles Galpin and Carl Taylor provided key leadership for 32 of its 34 years as the Division sought to understand the social structure of rural America and to do public policy-oriented research. It reached the height of its influence during the New Deal and World War II as it helped implement modern liberal policies in America''s farming sector, attempting to counteract the harsh effects of modern industrialism on the rural economy. In addition, the Division devoted resources to studying both the history and the contemporary state of rural social life. Sociology in Government offers the first detailed historical account and systematic documentation of this remarkable federal office. The Division of Farm Population and Rural Life was an archetypal New Deal governmental body, deeply engaged in research on agricultural planning and action programs for the disadvantaged in rural areas. Its work continued during World War II with farm labor and community organization work. Larson and Zimmerman emphasize the Division''s pioneering practices, presenting it as one model for applying the discipline of sociology in the government setting. Published in cooperation with the American Sociological Association, Sociology in Government preserves the history of this pathbreaking research unit whose impact is still felt today.

Analyses transnational corporations, groups who resist them, and the primary context within which the relationship between transnational corporations and their opponents unfold: the state. Argues that globalization is a contested terrain in which the power of transnational corporations is affected by mounting opposition and internal contradictions.

A collection of essays examining the various social, cultural, and economic intersections of rural place and global space, as viewed through the lens of education. Explores practices that offer both problems and possibilities for the future of rural schools and communities, in the United States and abroad.

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.

Examines the embeddedness of rural and farm women's lives in rural sociological research conducted by the USDA's Division of Farm Population and Rural Life (1919-1953). Explores how early rural sociologists found the conceptual space to include women in their analyses.