We explore the role of social capital in explaining patterns of rural larceny and burglary crime rates. We find consistent evidence that higher levels of social capital tend to be associated with lower levels of rural property crime rates. We also find that there is significant spatial heterogeneity in the underlying data-generating process. This…

Food safety and quality assurance systems have emerged as a key mechanism of food governance in recent years and are also popular among alternative agrofood movements, such as the organic and fair trade movements. Rural sociologists have identified many problems with existing systems, including corporate cooptation, the marginalization of small…

This article investigates the complex relationship between various dimensions of women's educational context and their contraceptive use later in life. Using data from rural Nepal on all the schools that ever existed in one community, I create geographically weighted measures of school characteristics--specifically teacher and student…

Often organized as grassroots, nonprofit organizations, many farmers' markets serve as strategic venues linking producers and consumers of local food while fulfilling multiple social, economic, and environmental objectives. This article examines the potential of farmers' markets to play a catalyst role in linking local food systems to the social…

Climate change is the preeminent environmental problem of this time, and Joseph Molnar's call for greater attention to it by rural sociologists is both welcome and timely. The agenda he lays out for rural sociology's engagement with climate change, however, seems rather narrow and restrictive. Examining the potential impacts of climate change,…

In his presidential address, Jess Gilbert argues that big states, in alliance with social scientists, can work to democratize society. He points to two fascinating examples--the involvement of rural sociologists with local citizens for policy planning in the New Deal and similarly their role in the Farm Security Administration's Resettlement…

Justifiably concerned about power dynamics between researchers and participants in participatory research, much of the literature proposes guidelines for including participant voices at every step of the research process. We find these guidelines insufficient for dealing with constraints set up by the social organizational structures in which…

To the extent that social science scholarship engages real-world developments it remains grounded and better able to resist elite agendas. With this in mind this article argues for the critical encounter with what I argue is the most significant struggle around food and agriculture today--the amorphous and broad-based movement that strives to…

In his presidential address Jess Gilbert examines two democratic experiments of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the New Deal: first, county planning that coordinated federal programs through citizen committees, and second, land redistribution to landless southern farmers, including a small number of black sharecroppers…

Climate change may be considered a natural disaster evolving in slow motion on a global scale. Increasing storm intensities, shifting rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other manifold alterations are being experienced around the world. Climate has never been constant in any location, but human-induced changes associated…

Economic changes and the machinations of the treadmill of production have dramatically reduced the number of jobs provided by extractive industries, such as mining and timber, in the United States and other affluent nations in the post-World War II era. As the importance of these industries to national, regional, and local economies wanes,…

Religious communities are important sources of bridging and bonding social capital that have varying implications for perceptions of social cohesion in rural areas. In particular, as well as cultivating cohesiveness more broadly, the bridging social capital associated within mainline religious communities may represent an especially important…

In contrast to those of other industrialized western European countries, France's agricultural community continued to represent the majority of the national population for a long time and only became one of many minority groups at the end of the twentieth century. It then came under the influence of various trends, sometimes conflicting but…

A complex array of socio-historical, demographic, and organizational factors have combined in recent years to threaten both the current status of and future prospects for the discipline of rural sociology, and for the Rural Sociological Society (RSS). This paper examines the somewhat problematic recent trajectories of the RSS as a professional…

In this study, we explore the social basis of environmental concern, specifically focusing on attitudes about the agricultural environment in relation to an individual's geographic and social distance from agriculture. We also consider the significance of rural recreational behaviors in relation to agro-environmental concern. The analysis, based…