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In the firm belief that rural sociology is currently in a state of malaise, this paper attempts to diagnose the sickness. Some of the main aspects of what is called 'conventional rural sociology' are outlined and their limitations discussed. It is argued strongly that rural sociology must become more theoretically-oriented in the problems it sets itself and that more attention be given to conceptual and theoretical issues. It is hoped that the paper will provide a focus which will stimulate debate around the questions raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comment on the paper "Planned Development via Project," by Dirk van Dusseldorp published in this issue of the journal "Sociologia Ruralis." The author welcomes Van Dusseldorp's concern for a more productive approach to planned development via projects. However he disagrees reasoning by which this argument is backed up. According to the author, the paper provides an inadequate theoretical background for the practical proposals which the writer advocates at the end and which are well worth consideration. The theoretical model of planning processes as 'linking loops' is unspecific. It is clearly an adaptation of economic and psychological theories of rational choice or decision-making. Even more sophisticated sociological models often remain extremely formal and tend to concentrate on the question of means of reaching and implementing decisions.

This paper introduces the contributions to the World Congress special issue on 'Agricultural Change: Class, State, Technology, and International Food Regimes in the Late 1980s'. The papers are placed in the context of recent trends in the literature in the sociology and political economy of agriculture. Trends highlighted are the decreased dominance of deductive theories and the increased attention given to commodity systems and rural social structures, to international food and agricultural regimes and international commodity complexes, to the sociology of agricultural science and technological change, to the dynamics of agricultural crisis, and to understanding the relations between production and circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on several abstracts published in the journal "Sociologia Ruralis." The paper "Theorising Nature and Society in Sociology: The Invisibility of Animals," by Hilary Tovey argues that animals are central to rural social life and a rural sociology needs to develop theorizations of the rural which incorporate this fact. It looks to environmental sociology, the sociology of the relations between nature and society, for help in this respect, but argues that the debates which have characterized recent sociology of the environment have focused attention on the problems of conceptualizing nature at the expense of attempts to reonceptualise society. The paper "Communities in Nature: The Construction and Understanding of Forest Natures," by Terry Marsden, Paul Milbourne, Lawrence Kitchen and Kevin Bishop outlines three different but interrelated theoretical strands associated with contemporary society-nature debates; namely social constructionism, realism and ecological modernization. By using empirical evidence from a case study of community and forestry interactions in a South Wales ex-mining village, the paper argues for the need to incorporate into these theoretical debates a deeper analysis of community understandings and practices.

The organic movement is hailed as a way of transforming industrial agriculture making it more ecologically sensitive. This paper explores, from a sociology of knowledge perspective, how biodynamic farmers' understandings are the basis for influencing a wider population. I argue that their relationship to their farming and‘Others’ resembles a form of religious life defined by asceticism, repetition, sacrifice, and an emphasis on spiritualism and purity. Their reserved relationships with the outside world, particularly in communicating their ideas on agriculture meanwhile recall the search for solitude of religious hermits. They reject a strategy of direct proselytising as attempting to persuade may involve compromises, it would mean revealing their difference and alienating themselves further from the wider community, and some of them question their ability to influence people and wider systems. On one level they want to maintain the purity of their ideals and farming practices, on another, they don't want to be made to feel too different. They take on the role of trying to change the wider agricultural system through example and‘bearing witness’ to the ideas of biodynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will aim to demonstrate how a wider theoretical and conceptual landscape, based around environmental social theory, can help to assist contemporary rural sociology in progressing its agenda. Of particular relevance here is an assessment of rural sociology by Buttel, where he makes the point that in the past decades work on aspects of regulation and globalization, for instance, has tended to be quite the reverse of the earlier theoretical developments of the 1970s and 1980s. He argues for more theoretical innovation to be undertaken. While the past decade or so has demonstrated quite a flurry of rich empirically engaged work, actual theoretical development has reached, he argues, something of a hiatus; with various schools tending to adopt a position along the actor-oriented-political economy axis.

Abstract The paper argues that animals are central to rural social life and a rural sociology needs to develop theorisations of the rural which incorporate this fact. It looks to environmental sociology, the sociology of the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, for help in this respect, but argues that the debates (particularly the ‘realist’ versus ‘social constructionist’ debate) which have characterised recent sociology of the environment have focussed attention on the problems of conceptualising ‘nature’ at the expense of attempts to reconceptualise ‘society’. It ends by arguing that sociology needs a ‘New Societal Paradigm’ which would include at least ‘domestic’ animals within society, and recognise the social relations of inequality and hierarchy through which their life opportunities are structured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does the rise of organic food as a social phenomenon mean politically? What political impact does this form of consumption have on society? Is it a small and unimportant “blip” in the overall march of globalized, industrialized food and rationalized consumption systems. Is it even, perhaps, complicit in this process? Or is it a radical break ? The array of answers to these questions forms the “production–consumption debate” currently taking place in the examination of agro–food systems. If agro–food networks are conceptualized as interactive, socio–ecological metabolic circuits linking agricultural nature, social labor, the corporeal and the symbolic, then this paper argues that analytical concern in agrofood studies has focused overwhelmingly on the production ‘moment’ in these circuits. Despite the lessons of numerous ‘food scares’, anti–GMO movements and the mad cow disease pandemic, an asymmetry now holds sway in agro–food studies between production and consumption even though in other fields, as Jackson (1999) notes, consumption has been “duly acknowledged” (p. 95). As this asymmetry is addressed, a contemporary reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’ might investigate the potential for new forms of progressive food politics, ranging from ‘weak’ struggles over the modes of social orderings, such as knowledge systems, to more formal alliances between producers and consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'new rural sociology' arguably represented the most significant watershed in the development of rural sociology during the 1970s and 1980s. I argue, however, that the new rural sociology, especially its dominant traditions of Chayanovian and neo-Leninist Marxism, has now been almost entirely superseded as a theoretical position in agrarian political economy by the international food regimes, commodity chains/systems analysis, regulationist, and actor-network traditions. In addition, Wageningen School research on `farming styles' and the 'cultural-turn' within rural sociology and rural studies have arisen, in part, as challenges to the more structuralist styles of reasoning within agrarian political economy. Parallel trends in the sociology of development are also discussed. The paper concludes with an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of these new late twentieth century traditions in agrarian political economy, particularly in comparison with the new rural sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reviewing some of the current developments in the economic restructuring literature, the paper examines the conceptual implications of the transition form Fordism for rural sociology. The author suggests the need for a stronger integration of social relations in the assessment of economic change. Two key dimensions for consideration are production-consumption relations and the reconstitution of labour relations. These considerations bring the author to the conclusion that rural sociology should focus on the integration of international and local processes and give more attention to the social contexts in which these processes are moulded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that we have reached an impasse in theorizing about agrarian social change due to the deterministic and centralistic assumptions of existing sociological theories of development, whether they adopt a modernization, dependency or political economy framework. What is needed, it is suggested, is a more serious attempt to analyse the dynamic processes by which individuals and social groups - peasants, workers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, politicians and others - interact and develop strategies for dealing with changing circumstances. Space must be found for an actor-oriented analysis of social process which identifies how 'ordinary people' rather than simply abstract 'social forces' actively shape the outcomes of development The argument, which draws upon the author's field research in Zambia and Peru is developed by considering three analytical issues a) the significance of differential responses to similar social conditions, b) the problem of relating interactional processes to larger scale social structure, and c) the question of how development policy is transformed at the 'interface' between implementer and target population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a number of critical reflections on some ideological distortions which have adversely biased research on the peasantry as a class, as a cultural universe and as a political force. The authors look at the two main traditions in the theory of modernization -- the "liberal" and the "Marxist" -- to prove that both assume the disappearance of the peasantry as a necessary event and that therefore the peasantry as such has inevitably become scientifically uninteresting for their representatives. They explore each tradition in some detail and establish the existence of a certain amount of open hostility towards the peasantry among certain sociologists, economists, planners, and policy makers. Significant countertrends in current rural sociology are, however, detected and a conclusion calls for greater attention to the values and possibilities of peasant culture and life, without falling into a romanticised vision of the peasantry, is reached in the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the currently most interesting sources of rural sociological research in contemporary Poland is the examination of the socio-economic and political consequences arising from the co-existence of a largely privately owned agricultural sector and a state industrial sector. The emergence of the dual-occupational "peasant-worker" is just one very important aspect of this phenomenon, and the aim of this paper is to outline some of the problems it creates for both these sectors. These peasant-workers fall outside of the state's attempts at incorporating the individual peasant into the planned economy whilst at the same time they are not as responsive nor as dependent as might be desired upon the state's demands in industrial production. Their "awkwardness" is all the greater in that the state does not possess the resources to propel them in one direction or the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the contribution that 'interpretative' research might make to rural sociology. Most research in rural sociology has had a heavy quantitative bias, and it is suggested that this bias has often made an understanding of the processes of social change more difficult. One way in which 'interpretative' sociology might prove of value is in bringing together the analysis of changes at the local 'community' level, and more widespread structural changes. The analysis of social transactions between peasants and cattle-dealers in the Spanish Pyrenees, undertaken by the author, focuses attention on the process of social change through the use of 'interpretative' rather than positivistic research methods. It is argued that changes at the 'community' level are only one example of the behaviour which rural sociologists might investigate using a more 'interpretative' approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on papers related to sociology. The paper "Rural Development: From Practices and Policies Towards Theory," by Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Henk Renting, Gianluca Brunori, Karlheinz Knickel, Joe Mannion, Terry Marsden, Kees de Roest, Eduardo Sevilla-Guzmán and Flaminia Ventura reflects the discussions in the IMPACT research programme and suggests that at the level of associated theory also a fundamental shift is taking place. Rural development is a autonomous process in which agriculture plays the key role. The paper "Food Supply Approaches: Exploring Their Role in Rural Development" by Terry Marsden, Jo Banks and Gillian Bristow explores the role of short food supply chains. In the paper, the consideration is given to the short food supply chains, and a three level topology is present. The dimensions and evolution of short food supply chain and the identification of four types of evolution have also been examined in the paper. Four types of evolution are temporal, spatial,demand and institutional.

This article focuses on several abstracts on sociology. "Ontology matters: The relational materiality of nature and agro-food studies," by David Goodman examines This paper examines the question of ontological choice in agro-food studies, and emphasizes that such choices are consequential, determining analytical points of entry, arenas of theory and praxis, and normative positioning. These questions are explored by examining the privileged place of the labor process in the development of agro-food studies and, as a more specific illustration, in analyses of agro-biotechnology. It is suggested that the modernist ontological priorities embedded in the unreconstructed conceptualization of the labor process not only have been ignored but also have found an unexamined place in post-structuralist agrarian political economy. The discussion closes by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of actor-network theory as an alternative avenue of critical engagement with the new bio-politics of agro-food networks. "A matter of life and death? Men, masculinities and staying behind in rural Ireland," by Caitriona Ni Laoire is set within the context of a growing interest in the gendered nature of rurality and of rural life, and in particular in the context of an emerging literature on rural masculinities. It focuses on rural men and in particular on the phenomenon of rising male rural suicide rates.