COMMENT.

The article presents research in the field of rural sociology. The author comments on the discrepancies and the similarities between the rural sociology of Europe and North America, as presented in the work of researchers John R. Fairweather and Jere Lee Gilles. According to them, American rural sociology is more empirical, more quantitative, ahistorical and suffused with methodological individualism. However, American rural sociology also emerges as more analytical and although this remains implicit in their discussion more systematically inductive. Their own study shares many of the assumptions and methodology of the "conventional rural sociology" of which they are otherwise critical. The author argues that in the U.S. land-grant college administrators, agricultural economists and government agencies dealing with rural areas constitute the significant others of rural sociologists as much, if not more than, sociologists working in other fields. According to him, in most European countries rural sociology is an activity undertaken in an institutional context which is very different to that of the United States and where, for example, few separate departments of rural sociology exist.