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There is plenty of evidence to show that the placid, harmonious exterior of rural society often hid a guerilla class warefare expressed in various forms of collective and individual action and in the institutions of an alternative rural society. The fact that 'proletarian' class imagery outnumbers the 'deferential traditionalists' partly vindicates scepticism about some of the more simplistic versions of the deference of agricultural workers. However, the particular problem about the relevance of either view can hardly be said to have been settled, since both are more or less equally tangential. It can now be seen just how hazardous it is to make any generalised statements about changes in the social imagery of agricultural workers. However, there have been a number of changes in the structural parameters of their social situation which lead me to suspect that the coherence of both 'deferential' and 'proletarian' traditionalism may have dissolved more and more into various forms of ambivalence.

This article deduces conclusions from all the discussions on rural sociology included in this journal. There has been a deliberate attempt to focus on those issues, which are relevant to the current crisis in rural sociology. Much of the routine work carried out by rural sociologists, particularly in the United States, has not been included or has been referred to only in passing. This has resulted in the omission both of lines of enquiry, which have now been virtually played out, and research, which has made little or no contribution to the advancement of the discipline. It has been a major theme of this report that rural sociology has still not adequately filled the conceptual vacuum left by the demise of the rural-urban continuum. It has been argued forcibly that in order to overcome these problems rural sociology could learn from the example of its urban counterpart by beginning from a holistic theory of society within which the rural can be satisfactorily located and, as a corollary, developing theories which link the social structure with the spatial structure.

This brief, highly selective and deplorably inadequate account of rural sociological research in state socialist societies is intended to show some of the benefits of investigating the role of the state in agricultural and regional development in a comparative perspective. It also illustrates the way in which the generation of socio-spatial inequalities commonly attributed to capitalism may partially be due to the process of industrialization per se, whether within a primarily planned or primarily market economy. One of the concerns, which are most prevalent within Western Europe, derives from the increasing awareness of the irrationalities of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union Commission (EEC). However, in the United States, the state has played a less visible and more indirect role, relying less on direct intervention but nonetheless fostering the growth of agribusiness by a variety of fiscal and other measures. While in the EEC it is the cost of farm support policies, which have become the major public issue, in the United States it has been the accelerated trend towards corporate agribusiness, the increasing rate of attrition of small farmers and the breakdown of the rural way of life.

The article considers the enormous literature on agricultural change in Eastern Europe. It does not attempts to present a comprehensive overview of rural sociological research in all of the state socialist societies in Eastern Europe, but will instead concentrate on a few pertinent themes which relate to the central concerns of the rural sociology. Rural sociology in Eastern Europe cannot, of course, be considered as a unity, any more than the rural social structures of the respective Eastern European societies. One of the more remarkable aspects of rural sociology in Eastern Europe concerns its close convergence with the research style of rural sociology as it has emanated from the United States. One of the more remarkable aspects of rural sociology in Eastern Europe concerns its close convergence with the research style of rural sociology as it has emanated from the United States. There is even a noticeable similarity in the selection of problems and methodology of research, social book-keeping and "dust-bowl empiricism" are by no means confined to American rural sociology and have nestled comfortably into the apparatus of state planning in Eastern Europe, posturing about "Marxist-Leninist scientific principles" notwithstanding.

Community studies have long been the province of social anthropologists and social historians so that one finds in the area of rural community studies one of the most widespread methodologies for the study of rural social change as well as objects of study in their own right. In many respects the mid-1960s was a period of considerable turmoil in the field of community studies. This was partly the result of theoretical advances, but more importantly it was due to cumulative empirical refutation. The rural community studies became bound up in a generalized attack upon "abstracted empiricism" on account of their impressionistic methodology, their excessive descriptions of local ecology, social organizations and social participation, and their parochial and a historical bias. This decline has also been associated with the downfall of the rural-urban continuum, which provided a rationale for such studies. There is now a widespread realization that the processes of rural change are more complex than this and that change cannot be regarded as an exogenous factor, which impinges upon an other-wise static rural community.

In subsistence or near-subsistence economies access to and control over land is, almost by definition, a crucial resource; the structure of landholding is therefore both a cause of and closely follows the structure of power in such societies. Precisely how landholding is related to the social structure has been a matter of considerable debate, and the crucial mediating variable is the concept of property. This problem has been considered in terms of the interrelationship between three analytical categories, the economics of agricultural production, property relationships, and the rural social structure. The precise nature of the interrelationship between these categories has been a matter of fierce and continuous debate for centures, in jurisprudence, political and moral philosophy, political economy and, latterly, in sociology. In general, the issue of property, particularly that of land tenure, is only taken seriously by rural sociologists in the underdeveloped world, where the consideration of land reform has made it unavoidable. Elsewhere it has, with a few exceptions, been overlooked.

There is a general agreement between several historians who have documented the history of rural sociology in the U.S. that it has emerged as a discipline out of the "farm crisis" in the U.S. which followed the Civil War and which drew increasing public attention towards the end of the nineteenth century. Within academic circles the "farm problem" was taken up by agricultural economists, with whom over the years rural sociologists were to become more closely allied than with sociologists researching into other areas. In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt crowned their efforts by announcing his appointment of a Commission on Country Life, which was responsible in large measure for the development of rural sociological research and teaching in the United States. Also, the Purnell Act of 1925, which has been described as a measure of paramount importance in the history of rural sociological research, has enabled the colleges of agriculture and agricultural experiment stations set up under the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887, the so-called Land Grant institutions, to support rural sociological research.

The theoretical problems which currently beset rural sociology cannot be analyzed solely in terms of the history of rural sociology in the United States, since at various points in this history American rural sociologists have relied heavily upon contributions from the more theoretical and philosophical tradition in Europe. The general approach of the classic nineteenth-century European writers in sociological theory was a brisk dismissal of the significance of rural society as archaic and backward, while economic and social innovation would emanate from the towns and from industry. Although rural life would in turn be transformed by these material and cultural innovations, it was cast in the role of the passive receiver of these processes to be in turn moulded and adapted by them. In a theoretical sense rural sociology therefore remains a prisoner of its history. The fault lies very much in the way in which the original concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft have been subsequently employed. However, the rural sociology in the U.S. is believed to be devoted to upholding the integrity of the distinctive qualities of rural life.

Presents an introduction to the March 1980 issue of the journal "Rural Sociology."

This paper is concerned with the ideologies which surround one form of property ownership--the ownership of agricultural land. Least attention will be devoted to the extent to which owning land is to hold an economic power resource--in rural areas, where the range of occupational choice is almost by definition restricted, this may be treated as 'given'.[1] More specifically, this paper will be concerned with data on landed property collected in East Anglia.[2] The central concern will be to illustrate how justificatory theories concerned with the legitimacy and the domain of the distribution of property, once they have entered our stock of knowledge and vocabulary of understanding, retain their essence and are transmitted down the generations and across classes, to reappear as unthinking common-sense 'statements of fact' decontexmalised from the initial situation in which they originated, and to which they were originally addressed. For example, those who have never heard of Hume and never paid heed to the writings of Locke, nevertheless pay such philosophers tribute when unknowingly they. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the widely held view that novel and fundamental changes in the structure of social hierarchy have altered the basis of distributional conflict in modern Britain. Reference to nineteenth-century developments shows that sectionalism, egoism and privatism are not peculiar to the present economic recession. It is then argued that commentators on the left and right alike have oversimplified the relationship between the distributional order of societies, on the one hand, and the specific forms taken by distributional conflicts on the other. This means that the implications of the lack of a capitalist Sittlichkeit (morality or moral order) for social integration may be quite different from those commonly drawn in recent studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with a study investigating sources of variation in agricultural workers' images of society. This study, based on empirical research, explores factors rarely relevant to authors' purpose here, as the locality studies on which they base their discussion were predominantly of "Highland Zone" villages where there are comparatively few agricultural workers who are not kinsmen of farmers. This notwithstanding, in pointing to the interactional, as opposed to the attributional nature of local stratification they opened the way to an understanding of one the bases of social imagery. There are a variety of types of local interactional social systems and below which authors specify some that are particularly relevant to agricultural workers. A term "local social situation," used in this article refers to particular agricultural workers' personal social networks. There have been recent substantial developments in the study of social stratification both within and between the middle and working classes. There has been variety of studies in this regard, specially for British communities, which have appeared to contribute towards broadening the basis of understanding of rural social relationships.

Agriculture in general and agricultural workers in particular have mainly aroused the interest of sociologists in this country in the context of rural community studies. Unfortunately these studies have by no means dealt with a representative sample of the different types of agriculture carried out in Great Britain, so that a very uneven representation has emerged. This article outlines the approach followed in a study of a particular group of deferential workers-agricultural workers-which the writer is currently undertaking in East Anglia. The emphasis is dynamic rather than static, for it will be argued that significant changes within the overall class situation of agricultural workers have taken place in recent years. Indeed the 'second agricultural revolution' has altered the components of their class situation in certain very important ways. Examining how far these changes have imposed strains on the agricultural workers' deferential image of society should enable an assessment of their relative importance to be made.