1. Civic Agriculture, the Civil Class and the Future of Rural America.
- Author
-
Irwin, Michael, Lyson, Thomas, Tolbert, Charles, Blanchard, Troy, and Nucci, Alfred
- Subjects
INTERNATIONAL business enterprises ,AMERICAN business enterprises ,INVESTORS ,INCOME ,WAGES ,POPULATION ,AGRICULTURE - Abstract
As rural America turns down the path of a new century, the independent, self-reliant farmer and small business owner of the last century may be disappearing from the landscape. In many rural communities, it is the large national and multinational corporations that seem to have set the development agenda. Yet, one of the paradoxes of rural America is that some communities retain educated and skilled residents. The civil class, comprised of these small business stakeholders, still thrives in many rural localities, yielding beneficial consequences for the communities. The fundamental attribute of this civic class is its relative autonomy from wage labor and from forces that steer workers towards wage-maximizing behaviors such as out-migration. This civil class is rooted in constellations of local relationships and localized markets. Our hypothesis is that, when this group of local business persons and small farmers succeeds, it serves to benefit the community and buffers it from external, global forces. Specifically we: define the civil class, describe fully individual and household attributes of its members, and contrast it with the wage and salaried middle class. We geographically locate the prevalence of the civil class in detailed spatial terms. We then analyze temporal changes in retention of individuals in this class using multilevel models of community economic, social and cultural contexts hypothesized to promote this class sector. We conduct this analysis primarily with confidential internal Census data files that are sufficiently large and detailed to address adequately these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004
- Full Text
- View/download PDF