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Examines trends in social science research on biotechnology and agriculture. Discusses role of private industry's biotechnology "hype" in defining social science research policy in universities. Suggests that widespread promotion of biotechnology as "revolutionary" contributed to lack of academic scrutiny. Examines social impact of agricultural biotechnologies. Contains 28 references. (TES)

This paper is an empirical test of the dimensionality and predictive value of the alternative-conventional agricultural paradigm (ACAP) scale developed by Beus and Dunlap. While recognizing that this scale may be appropriate and useful in studies of the agricultural intelligentsia (agricultural scientists, farm policy makers, organization leaders, and farm people actively following and participating in policy deliberations), our data suggest several shortcomings of this scale among a more general sample of farm operators. Initially, the scale is not satisfactorily unidimensional; instead, relatively clear-cut environmental and family-farmist dimensions emerged in our analysis of farmer attitudes. Separate environmental and family-farmist subscales performed better than an omnibus (or paradigmatic) scale in predicting farm operator behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While environmental sociology and the sociology of natural resources nominally focus on the same subject matters, in practice the literatures in the two subdisciplines have tended to be quite separate intellectual enterprises. Environmental sociology and the sociology of natural resources have different origins, their practitioners tend to have distinctive institutional locations, their problematics are different, and their theoretical tendencies differ considerably. I provide an overview of the divergent courses that have been taken within these two areas of inquiry, with stress on their institutional histories and intellectual legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural sociologists in North America and Western Europe have shown increasing interest in the issues of rural environmental quality, the structure of agriculture, and rural underdevelopment during the past decade. This paper seeks to demonstrate the profound connections among these phenomena, particularly in terms of how ongoing changes in agricultural structure have had major impacts on both the rural environment and the socioeconomic fabric of rural communities. It is argued that while many of these changes are rooted in the dynamics of the Western capitalist societies, state policy has also been crucial in shaping change in rural society. A case is thereby made that a more holistic or integrative perspective -- essentially a political economy -- is necessary to understand the origins of these rural social and economic problems and conceptualize strategies through which they can be solved. Selected examples of the application of such a perspective are developed in the final portion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concern of this paper is with the possible political implications of the well-acknowledged trend toward greater off-farm labor marker participation among U.S. farmers and their families. The relevant literature suggests two rival perspectives. The first, derived from 1960s rural sociological research on involvement in agrarian protest by the National Farmers Organizations, implies that part-time farmers' economic insecurity, industrial work experience, union membership, and marginality in the rural community will lead part-time farmers to be more politically liberal or progressive than full-time farmers. A contrary image of the possible political orientations of part-time farmers is based on a variety of data which indicate the general economic and educational privilege of part-time farmers by comparison with full-time farmers. Relatively privileged part-time farmers would thus be expected to be less politically progressive or liberal than full-time farmers. Utilizing data from a 1979 sample survey of New York State farmers, these two contrasting images of the political concomitants of part-time farming are explored. Data for the total sample of farmers show small inverse relationships between part-time farming status and indicators of liberal political ideologies, while these relationships tend to be somewhat larger among the subsample of small farmers. Part-time farming families in which the operator has a white-collor off-farm job are found to be a particularly conservative segment among part-time farmers. While there is some tendency for part-time farmers to be more politically conservative than those who farm full-time, the results are largely consistent within emergent view that the socioeconomic differences between full-time and part-time farmers are less than the difference within each category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is concerned with the factors that account variation in the environmental attitudes of farmers. Two competing frame-works for the analysis--one form environmental at attitudes research among the general public and the other from the emerging ecological critique of large-scale agriculture--are contrasted and used to develop reveal hypotheses. The empirical analysis is based on survey data collected from random samples of farmers in New York State and Michigan. The results indicate that education, which is typically considered to the most important variable in the environmental attitudes literature, bears with little relation with three indicators of concern about general and agricultural environmental problems. Farm size is inversely related to these attitudinal indexes of environmental concern, consistent with these ecological critique of large-scale agriculture. While these results lead us to we that the ecological critique framework tends to be most relevant in accounting for farmer environmental attitudes research tradition--Political liberalism--exhibits substantial positive relationships with the three indexes of general and agrarian environmentalism. In addition, the results show that non-economic orientation toward agriculture is an important antecedent of concern with soil erosion. Finally, some suggestive but inconclusive findings regarding the role of economic security in facilitating pro-environmental attitudes among farm operators are discussed and recommended as a focus for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is predicated on the argument that aspects of the scale and structure of agricultural systems bear substantial relationships to the energy intensity of agricultural production. An ecological analysis is undertaken in the United States utilizing farm size, structure, and energy intensity characteristics of the 50 states. The data reveal a consistent positive association of farm size with the energy intensity of crop production, while the prevalence of corporate agriculture, itself closely related to farm size, also bears a substantial positive association with energy intensity of crop production. The study concluded with a discussion of the implications of the results for social policies of the reverse the trend toward larger farm units and to reduce the energy intensity of United States agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the sociopolitical consequences of agrarian values in American society with sample survey data. We begin by considering the historical background of agrarianism, populism, and rural unrest—emphasizing the irony that agrarian values have historically provided both a rhetorical legitimation of the American social order and a critical posture toward the society. It is argued that this paradox derives from the fact that agrarianism has historically revolved around both private property and socioeconomic equality. We hypothesize that the agrarian critique of the U.S. social order generally has been confined to a critique of politics and the political system, rather than the private property-based stratification system, and that agrarianism is not closely linked to political party identification. These hypotheses are largely borne out in the results. We conclude by discussing the implications of the results for research on American political opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on the impact of biotechnology in agriculture. The specific focus of this paper is on biotechnology as related to agriculture, broadly construed to include agribusiness input and output industries and the agricultural research complex. It emphasizes agriculture in relation to biotechnology for several reasons other than the natural interest in such a topic because of the location in a college of agriculture in a land-grant university. One reason for focusing on biotechnology in agriculture is that world-wide, the agriculturally-related market for biotechnology processes and products may become the single largest one, surpassing even pharmaceuticals or organic chemicals. Two other reasons for focusing on agriculture relates to the major substantive concerns of this paper. With regard to industrial structure, agriculture, through the seed industry, has come to occupy a prominent place in ongoing competitive strategies and struggles among large fertilizer, oil, chemical, and pharmaceutical corporations. The principle concern of this paper is the role of biotechnology in what we see are nascent shifts that will ultimately portend fundamental restructuring of institutions relating to agriculture and the larger economy.