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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 paper presents, in a modified Weberian framework, an approach to the study of capitalist farmers in the British class structure. Their market situation is principally analysed in terms of the outcome of pressure group activity vis-a-vis the state. A typology is derived for their work situation based upon the degree of market-orientation and the degree of direct involvement in husbandry. This typology can be related to the legitimating strategies which farmers choose to operate over their employees. The analysis of their status situation emphasises the declining coherence of the evaluating criteria on which status is based and illustrates the limitations of existing occupational prestige studies with regard to farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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]

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.