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Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The special edition of the journal "Sociologia Rurails" seeks to redress imbalance by positioning the rural more centrally within recent developments and debates focused on social natures. The seven papers that make this volume were originally were presented in a workshop of the XIX Congress of the European Society for Rural Sociology that took place in 2001 in Dijon, France. This special edition commences with two papers that provide broad reviews of the position of animals within recent writings on social nature. In the first of these papers, Hilary Tovey focuses on what she terms the invisibility of animals within sociology. Reviewing recent writings on social nature, she argues that animals have either been ignored altogether or have been subsumed into wild nature, leaving domestic animals, and particularly those linked to agriculture, othered within sociological literatures. For Tovey, domestic animals pose a problem for sociologists of nature, in that they cannot be comfortably positioned within either nature or culture. She shows how such animals play an important role in shaping dominant representations of rurality and particular rural (farming) cultures, and argues that domestic animals need to be taken more seriously by environmental and rural sociologists so that more appropriate theoretical understandings of rural society can be developed.

The article presents information on a workshop related to the linkages between theory and practice in rural sociology. The papers in this Workshop concentrate on the conditions affecting the utilization of rural sociological research findings by practitioners. A restriction is that papers deal with applied research and not with pure research, which in the long run can have an important effect on the decisions of practitioners. There are four papers: (1) a paper by the author, which gives a theoretical framework, but no empirical evidence that this framework is correct. Unfortunately, this paper is somewhat out of date, because after it was written, the author obtained an overview of 4000 publications in this field, (2) a paper by author M. Lerner, which gives a case study of 15 years of sociological research for the Settlement Department of the Jewish Agency in Israel. Experience taught that it was necessary to change the relations between research workers and practitioners considerably over this time, (3) a paper by author A. Levesque, which describes to years experience of a French private research agency in research on rural development for a number of different government agencies and professional organizations, (4) a paper by author R. Riedler, based on experience in a mountainous district of Austria, where not much empirical sociological research has been done.

This article presents a list of papers related to rural sociology. The list includes "A Typology of Singhalese Villages," by G.H.F. Welikala, "Social Structure and Local Initiative in Rural Thailand," by G. Kalshoven, "Legitimization of Directed Change in Pre-industrial Societies," by Ashghar Fathi, "Rural-Urban Migration and Town-Country Relationship in Israel," by A. Berler and Y. Ginsburg, "A Theoretical Model of Cumulative Disagiarization," by Vogislav Duric, "The Changing Patterns of Settlement and Population Distribution in Latin America," by Olen E. Leonard, "Mexican-American Migrant Farm Laborers and Their Employers in Ohio," by B. Perry Joseph and Eldon E. Snyder, "The Rural-Urban Transition in Brazil," by John V.D. Saunders, "The Impact of Industrialization on Geographic Mobility and Economic Decision-Making of a Rural Society in South Asia: A Case Study From Rourkela/Orissa, India," by K.H. Junghans and "A Research Design for the Understanding of Social Change From a Human Ecosystem Perspective."

This article deals with the pattern of changing functions of the rural community consequent on changes in agriculture. The first half of the paper is devoted to the definition of the problem under investigation, an outline of its precise scope and an indication of its limits. The article is concerned both with those social changes in the rural community that are the product of internally generated developments in agriculture and also those that result from the effect on agriculture of the influence of outside factors. The paper confines its analysis to European conditions and, more particularly, to the more-developed rural regions of Europe. Taking up the findings of the Limerick Rural Survey in Ireland, the article illustrates these consequences by reference to them. The first consequence is shown to consist mainly in a weakening of the rigid class system which formerly kept the farm laborer in subordination. Today, due to their shortage and the possibility of bettering their lot by emigration, the status of the farm laborers is being upgraded, to an extent that is having some unsettling effects on the farmer's family, on whom the burden of agricultural work is falling more heavily.

The article presents discussion by various sociologists during the fourth working session of the First World Congress for Rural Sociology held in Dijon, France. Sociologist Antonio M. Arce from Costa Rica briefly commented on Pakistani sociologist A.M. Khan's paper entitled "Impact of changes in agriculture on political life in Asia". These comments refer to three different aspects of the paper and are expected to stimulate discussions from the audience. The paper tries to analyse the dynamic relationship between agricultural development efforts and political ferment in Asia and how this interdependence relates to the residues of Western colonialism and the emergence of Russian and Chinese communism. Another sociologist R. Bičanič from Yugoslavia discussed about the interference of politics in sociology. He also discussed the point dealing with the revival of rural sociology in socialist countries, particularly Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The rural exodus linked with accelerated industrialization has become so intense that agriculture is threatened with a depleted labour force, and this leads to a policy of income parity with industrial workers for agricultural producers also which may have wider political implications.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Rui Graça Feijó and João Arrivacado Nunes on the context of household formation in Portugal during the nineteenth century, and another by Martine Berlan on the feminist approach to rural sociology.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper 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. The paper reviews existing research in order to ascertain the validity of popular claims of high and rising suicide rates among young men in rural Ireland, and explores possible explanations for this phenomenon. It draws on medical and psychological literature but sets this material in a wider geographical context, focusing on processes of contemporary rural restructuring and the oft-cited masculinity crisis. The paper concludes that in order to understand the processes behind rising male suicide rates, we need to understand the struggles for power and identity that are going on in places, and the movements of people in and out of places. Therefore geography and gender studies can contribute to a greater understanding of the phenomenon, suggesting that this is an area that merits further interdisciplinary research. [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]

Rural sociologists, for a long time now, have doubted whether their discipline really existed. In the developed countries, the agricultural population has shrunk, so that nowadays it may account for as little as 4 percent of the total gainfully employed population; it has also gradually become more difficult, and even impossible, to put one's finger on the differences between rural and urban. These changes have affected rural sociologists in various ways. Some have left the field altogether. Others have turned their attention to new problems that occur in the countryside, problems that are mostly related to the uses made of open space and natural resources. They have specialized in the sociology of recreation, the sociology of environmental problems, or in regional planning. According to the author, the discipline has not only lost the wholeness it may once have had, but also that the specializations themselves are often marked by the lack of a holistic outlook. It is as if rural sociologists have lost sight of the fact that, whatever phenomenon they study, it is embedded in a context as wide as a total society, and even wider.

The article presents several papers on rural sociology. The paper "Technology and Social Change: The Case of Miracle Rice," by Gelia T. Castillo, presents the many changes directly or indirectly associated with the introduction in the Philippines of IR8-28S-3, more popularly known as miracle rice. No other single piece of agricultural technology seems to have generated as many ramifications in the country as this particular rice seed. The paper "A General Systems Approach to the Analysis of Social Structure and Change," by J.D. Flynn. Techniques were derived from general systems theory to indicate a measure of the variety of sub-systems, and several measures of unity derived from a matrix of subsystem interactions. Changes in the measures over time reveal some causes of structural change and are used to predict implications of planned change. The techniques were used to analyze data from a village in the Canadian Arctic. The data were not very reliable, but the development of variety and changes in unity were both noted.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents information on the First World Congress for Rural Sociology, which took place in August 1964 at Dijon. The number of papers, submitted to this Congress, was far greater than that received for the Third Congress of the European Society for Rural Sociology in 1962 at St. Wolfgang. Therefore it is impossible to publish, the complete written material. Full texts are included of main papers and papers of prepared discussants only. Of the regional papers the summaries are given. The discussions are reported in the languages used by the participants during the meetings. Some of the regional papers will appear in full text in later issues of this Journal, others will be submitted to other journals in the field. Of the regional papers the summaries are given. The discussions are reported in the languages used by the participants during the meetings.

In early 1990s Greece became one of the prime destination countries for the migrant peoples of the collapsing regimes of the Balkan and Eastern European countries, experiencing, thus, a historical reversal of the massive exodus, in the 1950s and 1960s, of Greeks to the labour markets of Germany, Australia and the USA. This historical reversal seems to identify a pattern that is common to the Southern European countries. Over the last ten years, immigrant population has grown to attain approximately one tenth of the population of Greece. This development occurs at a time when pressures are being exerted on agricultural incomes following the reform of the CAP and subsequent evidencing of the first consequences of market liberalization in the context of a globalizing international economy. This paper aims at analyzing and interpreting the main findings of an empirical research programme on the economic and social implications of migrant settlement and employment in rural Greece. The research was carried out in three paradigmatic regions of the country: a) in a mountainous, less favoured region, b) in a region with dynamic agriculture, and c) in an insular region of agricultural and tourist development. The paper draws from a qualitative study of administrators and opinion leaders. It is divided into four parts: the first part presents the main elements of migration in rural Southern Europe in the frame of what is known as the South European model of migration. The second part discusses migration towards Greece and reviews research work relating to rural migration. With reference to methodology and the main research hypotheses, the third part presents the analysis of empirical findings concentrating on the importance of migrant labour for the operation of the farm and rural restructuring followed by a discussion of the position and role of migrants in rural society and development. The final part summarizes the main conclusions of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that recent debates over the future of rural studies have been, in some cases, highly dualistic, claiming that it is necessary to choose between political–economy or poststructuralism and between adopting a structuralist/modernist class–analysis or a poststructuralism/postmodernism in which class does not figure. It is argued that there are good reasons for resisting such constructions of choice, and the paper seeks to demonstrate the value of paying attention to discursive constructions of class. Drawing on four pieces of rural research, it is suggested that class is still a salient discursive construct, both within popular images of rurality and within the descriptions of rural life made by, at least some, rural residents. It is also argued that while many rural residents do explicitly reject class identities, often preferring to construct identities through a range of rural lifestyle discourses, these themselves often draw upon cultural textures of class. [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]

The article presents abstracts of research on rural sociology. They include "Trade Roots in Tanzania: Evolution of Urban Grain Markets Under Structural Adjustment," "Business as Usual: Some Real Food Markets in Kenya," and "Economic Liberalization, Real Markets and the Unreality of Structural Adjustment in Rural Tanzania."

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Adolf Ehrentraut on the representation of rurality and another on sheep farmers in Scotland by John Gray.

This article traces briefly the use of the comparative method in sociology. It documents that what is currently called "cross-national research" is an interest that has antecedents running back for at least a century in a great variety of fields. Secondly, the article argues for a closer interplay between sociological theory construction and cross-national data. Because current sociological theory is exceedingly culture-bound, basing its propositions largely on data derived from modern American and Western European societies, the need for testing hypotheses within truly cross-cultural settings is most timely and urgent. Thirdly, the paper article delineates three major methodological problems in cross-national research. These problems include the requirement of equivalence of meaning, the requirement of concept equivalence and the requirement of equivalence of cultural variability. It concludes with a recommendation for furthering interest in cross-national research in rural sociology.

The author introduces the January 1962 issue of "Sociologia Ruralis." This special issue contains the addresses given and the discussions which took place, at the Third Congress of the European Society for Rural Sociology in September 1962. In this way the author hopes to make known the results of this international exchange of experience, in the field of rural sociology and rural planning, to those members who were unable to attend the congress, as well as to the wider public which is interested in this subject. Some papers published in this issue have had to be shortened. All contributions to discussions were not committed to paper by the speakers. The order of the official programme has been followed in the following pages and modifications which were made during the Congress for expediency are ignored. The author tanks those who have contributed for the publication of this issue.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including the rural social research in retrospect and the continual reinvention of rural sociology.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Introduces articles and research papers of the July 1985 issue of the Journal "Sociologia Ruralis."

The article presents information about the "Fourth World Congress of Rural Sociology" that will be held in Torun, Poland from August 9-13, 1976. The participants of the Congress may be members of International Rural Sociological Association and regional societies, non-associated rural sociologists, representatives of related disciplines, students of rural sociology and invited guests. The general theme of the Congress determined by the Program Committee is "Integrated Development of Human and Natural Resources: The Contribution of Rural Sociology." There was special concern that people interested in particular topics would have the opportunity to meet and exchange their experiences and ideas. To achieve this objective, each participant will select two non-competing seminars to attend for three sessions each, at which papers, research and policy issues will be discussed.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For more than a generation a considerable amount of attention has been given to the development and utilization of an empirical measure of the theoretical concept of innovativeness. Research workers in agriculture have employed various types of adoption of farm practices scales as a measure of the relative rates of adoption of technological innovations by farmers. The major problem in using an adoption scale has rested with unidimensionality; the degree to which the developed scale measures the innovativeness dimension. Following the review of several research studies aimed at establishing unidimensionality, some sociologists claimed that the analyses provided no clear cut answer as to whether adoption scales measure only a single general dimension; innovativeness. The major aims of this paper are to demonstrate that such unidimensionality does clearly exist and to show the theoretical and practical implications. The data used in this paper were drawn from an interdisciplinary study of the factors determining the adoption of agricultural innovations by a sample of 116 woolgrowers in New South Wales.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This section presents abstracts of several articles about rural sociology. The article, From Stilton to Vimto: Using Food History to Re-Think Typical Products in Rural Development, by Angela Tregear, traces the evolution of food-territory links in great Britain, taking account of critical social, economic and political forces. This leads to a classification of typical products grounded in British conventions, whose contributions to rural development are contrasted with those of classic Mediterranean products, with some challenging results. In the article Forging Linkages in the Commodity Chain: The Case of the Chilean Salmon Farming Industry, 1987-2001, the authors use the global community chain perspective to analyze the impact of food distribution and retail sectors on the Chilean salmon farming industry. The impact of the farmed salmon global commodity chain on class and gender relations at the point of production is also discussed. Drawing upon a case study data and holistic conceptual approach to the family farm, the paper Contingency Revealed: New Zealand Farmers' Experiences of Agricultural Restructuring argues that farm-level experiences of agricultural restructuring during the rural downturn were contingent upon a much greater array of factors.

This section presents abstracts of several articles about rural sociology. The paper Distant Bodies? Rural Studies, Political-Economy and Poststructuralism, written by Martin Phillips suggests that recent debates over the future of rural studies have been, in some cases, highly dualistic, claiming that it is necessary to choose between political-economy or poststructuralism and between adopting a structuralist/modernist class-analysis or a poststructuralism/postmodernism in which class does not figure. Drawing on recent research that has highlighted both the heterogeneity and agency of youth, the paper, We Make Our Own Fun: Reading the Politics of Youth With(in) Community, by Ruth Panelli, Karen Nairn and Jaleh McCormack, reports on how young people experience and negotiate social relations and everyday spaces in a rural community. In the article, Contemporary Clerical Constructions of a Spiritual Rural Idyll, it is suggested that both historically and in the present, country clergy play a part in the creation, re-creation, envisioning, and transmission of a spiritual variant of the rural idyll. This is largely the result of growing institutional marginalisation.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the author discusses animal health in rural sociology, and article on avian influenza, and articles on biosecurity policies.

The article presents information on the Proceedings of the Second World Congress for Rural Sociology, which was held in August, 1968 in Enschede/Drienerlo, the Netherlands.

In the article, the authors presents a rejoinder to a comment by Howard Newby on their article in which they had compared the North American and European journals of rural sociology. The study raises two points, which the authors feel must be clarified lest their work be misunderstood. The first concerns the nature of that research and the second concerns the role of ontological assumptions in sociological research. The authors mentioned that their study of the two rural sociology journals was motivated by reflections on their own intellectual activity, and the content analysis of the journals carried out by them was not a sociological investigation. The purpose of their content analysis was to provide an understanding of the characteristics of the two journals from which an explanatory project might proceed. The authors add that Newby's depiction of their work as non-sociological and positivist does underscore an irony. They clarifies that their paper, like many others, does not go beyond the limits of assumptions and data.

The article presents several abstracts of research papers published in the July 3, 2001 issue of the journal "Sociological Ruralis." It discusses the cultural economics in the rural areas of Europe. The paper "Transnational Co-operation Between Rural Areas: Elements of a Political Economy of European Union Rural Development," by Christopher Ray considers the significance of the phenomenon in terms of the emergence of a rural development system. "Exploring the Dimensions of Culture Economies in Rural West Wales," by Moya Kneafsey, Brian Ilbery and Tim Jenkins, interrogates the nature and extent of the culture economy as a force for rural development in West Wales. The discussion draws on empirical material from research into four different product sectors, namely, specialty beef and lamb, organic fruit, vegetables and meat, specialty cheese and artisanal crafts. Of particular significance is the research paper "Governing the Boundaries of Viability Economic Expertise and the Production of the Low-Income Farm Problem in Australia," by Vaughan Higgins which discusses how economic expertise assumed prominence as key authorities in constituting previous collectivist forms of assistance as irrational, and in linking the future viability of Australian agriculture to the theories and practices of agricultural economists.

Mobility and migration are central aspect of modern society and challenges rural areas both structurally and culturally and young people, in particular, are described as globally oriented and detached from tradition. Instead of arguing that places have less importance in modern society, the paper discusses how people's attachment to place must be considered as a multidimensional, dynamic and context related phenomenon by using regional university students' stories about their relationship to home place in rural as the empirical point of departure. In addition, migration does not imply local detachment. In their stories, geographical background is in different ways associated with gender, kinship, class and life style. The meaning they ascribe to their home place and how they describe their relationship to their home place can be considered as part of their formation and management of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of social exclusion may be used to connect the experiences of individuals and social groups to broader social and economic processes (linking ‘biography’ to ‘history’). This paper draws on recent empirical studies of young people in rural areas of Britain and other European countries to illustrate how social exclusion may operate in rural areas, particularly in the transition from education to employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article relates the author's comment on the article about the rural studies by Simon Miller. The author agreed on Miller's positive contribution that seek to account a sense of direction in an important aspect of rural studies. In this context, Miller traces a shift of direction towards the study of in-migration and consumption as essential for understanding changing social relations in the countryside. A contrast between the excellence of previous works and the poverty of empirical work undertaken by the author himself had been addressed. The author enumerates the three significant misapprehensions of Miller's paper that undermine his accuracy and trustworthiness.