SOCIOECONOMIC TRENDS CHANGING RURAL AMERICA



the rural community and away from nearby metropolitan centers to
which rural areas have been linked (Warner). It submits rural areas,
as “peripheries,” to the machinations of footloose power actors, e.g.,
multinational corporations, whose international activities in search
of profits are not easily regulated by the government of any given
nation (Howes and Markusen).

Ironically, the argument also is made that urban exploitation of
rural resources in the United States began to decline when the na-
tion entered international networks as a “centre” and began draw-
ing benefits from the rural resources of less developed “peripheral”
nations (Fox). Clearly, the well-being of rural people and communi-
ties in the United States is bound up, to no small extent, with the
changing position of the United States in world affairs.

The third broad background trend is the changing connection be-
tween place and community. Just as urban observers in the 1950s
and early 1960s began to discuss “The Exploding Metropolis” (For-
tune), so rural social scientists in that era began to write about “The
Expanding Rural Community” (Anderson). Since the earliest studies
of rural areas in America (Galpin) it has been obvious that rural
communities are large rather than small if community is defined as
the territory over which a local population moves as it meets its daily
needs (Hawley, p. 150).

With changes in transportation and communications technologies,
the community territory has continued to expand for rural people. It
has expanded now to the point that students of the community are
asking whether the territorial conception of community has any real
utility in explaining how people live and the actions they take in
public affairs in rural areas.

No one argues that this is strictly a rural phenomenon. The spatial
element in community definition is questioned for urban and rural
areas alike. At issue are the implications of the tendency for most
Americans to be members simultaneously of several community-
like networks, few if any of which coincide with local territorial
boundaries.

Does this mean we each have several communities and are that
much better off for it? Does it mean the local community is dying out
as it becomes merely a local stage on which multiple outside net-
works impinge upon one another without being articulated into an
integral unit? What are the consequences for community develop-
ment and social well-being? Key questions about the future of rural
America hinge on the projected consequences of this bifurcation be-
tween place and the organization of local social life.

Against these background patterns—the growing social cost of
space, the growth of world systems and the changing role of territory
in community life—some specific trends and rural conditions in the
1980s can be appraised. The main trends are well-known and need



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