Sociology of Rural Life TEXTBOOK

The Sociology of Rural Life
The Sociology of Rural Life

Sam Hillyard
Oxford • New York

First published in 2007 by
Berg
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© Sam Hillyard 2007
All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hillyard, Samantha.
The sociology of rural life / Samantha Hillyard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-138-8 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-138-8 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-139-5 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-139-6 (pbk.)
1. Sociology, Rural. 2. Sociology, Rural—Great Britain. I.
Title.
HT421.H44 2007
307.720941—dc22 2007015882
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 184520 138 8 (Cloth)

ISBN 978 184520 139 5 (Paper)
Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks

Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
www.bergpublishers.com
For John
Who reads Howard Newby today?
Contents
List of Tables x
List of Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
1 ‘A Problem in Search of Discipline’ (Hamilton 1990: 232) the

History of Rural Sociology 6
2 New Issues in Rural Sociology and Rural Studies 39
3 The 2001 Foot-and-mouth Disease Epidemic in the UK 67
4 The Hunting Debate: Rural Political Protest and the Mobilisation of

Defence of Country Sports 86
5 Game Shooting in the United Kingdom 110
6 Representing the Rural: New Methods and Approaches 135
Conclusion: the Future of Rural Societies and Rural Sociology 152
Appendix
Rural Sociology Institutional Framework: Critical Masses of Rural

Researchers in University Departments/Centres and Institutes; Sociologists
with a Periphery Interest in the Rural; Professional Associations; and
Rural Journals 157
Notes 160
Glossary of Key Terms 167
References 173
Index 186
List of Tables
1 Tönnies’s (1955) twin concepts of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft 7
2 Criticisms levelled at the community studies approach to social

research 19
3 Characteristics of the occupational community 29
4 Typology of East Anglian farmers 45
5 Service class sources of influence 55
6 Key thinkers and their ideas 63
7 Countries with outbreaks of FMD pre-2001 70
8 Amount of information for each type of audience 76
9 A selection of academic analyses of the impact of the 2001 FMD

epidemic 83
10 Guardian representations of the march’s message 100
11 Themes underpinning the march reported in the Telegraph 101
12 A selection of the game shooting literature 111
13 Opinions of shooting 124

List of Abbreviations
ALF – Animal Liberation Front

ANT – Action network theory
BAP – Biodiversity Action Plan
BASC – British Association for Shooting and Conservation
BBSRC – Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
BFSS – British Field Sports Society
BRASS – ESRC Centre for Business Relationship, Accountability,
Sustainability and Society, UK
BSA – British Sociological Association
BSE – Bovine spongiform encephalopathy
CA – Countryside Alliance
CAP – Common Agricultural Policy
CBBC – Children’s British Broadcasting Corporation
CLA – Country, Land and Business Association (formerly the Country
Landowners’ Association)
CPHA – Campaigning to Protect Hunted Animals
CPRE – Council for the Protection of Rural England
CRC – Cobham Resource Consultants
CRE – Centre for Rural Economy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
DEFRA – Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
EC – European Commission
ESRC – Economic and Social Research Council
ESRS – European Society for Rural Sociology
EU – European Union
FMD – Foot-and-mouth disease
GCT – Game Conservancy Trust
IFAW – International Fund for Animal Welfare
HE – Higher education
HEFCE – Higher Education Funding Council for England
HSA – Hunt Saboteurs’ Association
ICI – Imperial Chemical Industries
IGBiS – Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society,
University of Nottingham, UK
xii • Abreviations
IHR – Institute for Health Research, Lancaster University, UK

IOE – World Organisation for Animal Health, International Office of
Epizootics
IRS – Institute of Rural Studies
ISG – Independent Scientific Group
LACS – League Against Cruel Sports
LM3 – Local multiplier 3
MAFF – Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
NERC – National Environment Research Council
NFU – National Farmers’ Union
NGO – National Gamekeepers’ Organisation
PACEC – Public and Corporate Economic Consultants
PRA – Participatory rural appraisal
RAC – Royal Agricultural College
RDA – Rural Development Agency
RELU – Rural Economy and Land Use research programme
RSPCA – Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
RSS – Rural Sociological Society (US)
SFP – Single farm payment
SCCS – Standing Conference on Countryside Sports
SSRC – Social Science Research Council
UCL – University College London
VLA – Veterinary Laboratories Agency
Acknowledgements
Many colleagues directly or indirectly contributed to this project. They include

undergraduate students in the University of Nottingham’s School of Sociology and
Social Policy, postgraduate students inside the Institute for the Study of Genetics,
Biorisks and Society (IGBiS) and colleagues including Tracey Warren, Tim
Strangleman, Ellen Townsend and Graham Cox. Alice Phillips and Gill Farmer in
IGBiS provided administrative support and good humour and IGBiS’s director,
Robert Dingwall, supported my initial transgression into the rural and contributed
to an earlier version of chapter six. New colleagues at Durham University have
helped in the later stages. The text benefited enormously from the comments of an
anonymous referee.
Chapter 3 draws on data from an Economic and Social Research Council
funding project (grant no. L144 25 0050), chapters 4 and 5 upon a RELU grant
(RES-224–25–00111) and chapter 7 upon research funded by the University of
Nottingham’s New Lecturer’s Fund (grant no. NLF3062). The views expressed
here are those of the author and not necessarily of these funding bodies. Chapter
6 was supported by the University of Nottingham’s summer internship scheme in
2002, a research project conducted with Elizabeth Morris and the cooperation of
the librarians and the head teacher of the Darlington infants’ school. Chapter 4 is
a modified version of a paper presented to the European Society for Rural
Sociology in 2003. I would also like to thank the gamekeeper for permission to use
the photographic data set discussed in chapter 6. Any errors or omissions in the
book remain my own.
In the tradition of recognising that there are finer things in life than sociology,
thanks are finally due to John Hensby – and of course J & F.
SHH, Lincoln, October 2006

Introduction
This text offers a critical introduction to the sociology of the rural. It draws upon
classic and contemporary UK rural literature and the theoretical and methodolog-
ical approaches dominant in each. As a means to ground the discussion, three case
studies of three contemporary rural issues are explored. The approach applied
across the book is one that is informed by interactionist theory and ethnography,
building upon the rising status of qualitative methods in rural geography, and offers
an alternative to the popular approaches of political economy and postmodernism.
The emergence of rural sociology lies with the origins of the discipline of soci-
ology itself towards the end of the nineteenth century. The charge to explain the
impact of profound structural changes upon social ties and networks meant that the
first sociological accounts were not merely rural, but urban and rural – the two
dimensions went hand in hand. Hence Tönnies’s (1955) – the founding father of
rural sociology – twin concepts of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (community and
association) were just that: defined by the very distinctions between them. Whilst
Tönnies’s contemporary, Geog Simmel, moved to address the emerging phenom-
enon of the industrial city (Simmel 1971), they faced similar theoretical chal-
lenges. Centrally, this was to explain the implications of tremendous technological
advances and to translate the impact of profound economic restructuring upon
human associations.
One hundred years on, rural sociology is now quite different and far less promi-
nent within the parent discipline (Hamilton 1990). The text unravels the process by
which this decline or marginalisation occurred, to see if there is a future for a rural
sociology and in what directions useful rural sociological work may be pursued.
Such a task has long been perceived to be highly problematic:
There has been an ultimately futile search for a sociological definition of ‘rural’, a
reluctance to recognize that the term ‘rural’ is an empirical category rather than a soci-
ological one, that it is merely a ‘geographical expression’. As such it can be used as a
convenient short-hand label, but in itself it has no sociological meaning.
(Newby 1980: 8)
Newby sought a sociology of the rural that was also engaged with the business
of theorising as ‘there can be no theory of rural society without a theory of society
1
2 • The Sociology of Rural Life
tout court’ (Newby 1980: 9). The text explores how ‘the rural’ has been conceptu-
alised. The examples and literature used here are largely UK-based; however, the
wider issues of theory and method may appeal to international audiences con-
cerned with rural matters.
The first two chapters trace the history of rural sociology, commencing with very
early sociological work (such as Tönnies), and introduce a basic knowledge of essen-
tial sociological terminology and the development of the discipline. The text posi-
tions each sociological and geographic analysis within its disciplinary context and
paradigm, in order to view the dominant theoretical and methodological ideas and
approaches of the time. It considers, from the perspective of each theorist, what they
consider to be happening and why; how order is achieved; the implications of their
conclusions; and what they have defined as the key variables or concepts. The second
chapter unravels why ‘the rural has frequently been regarded as residual’ or less fash-
ionable within sociology and draws upon more contemporary works from within the
vibrant discipline of rural cultural and social geography (Newby 1980: 9). The final
three chapters explore substantive issues in the countryside, informed by the theo-
retical and methodological conclusions of the opening chapters. The topics
addressed are necessarily selective among the many sub-fields of rural studies (such
as rural sustainability, rural development, social exclusion and poverty). They are the
2001 foot-and-mouth disease crisis, the hunting debate and game shooting. The first
will be of interest to international readers interested in the social implications of
disease outbreaks. The latter two address two country sports that, whilst unique to
the UK in form, will strike interesting comparisons with research on hunting and
shooting in countries such as the US, Sweden, Spain and France. The text locates
itself primarily within the UK, which is, of course, located within the framework of
EC directives, most notably the CAP. The context is therefore one in which the UK
is influenced by European and global trends in agriculture and consumption. All
three of the substantive issues addressed in the final chapters are instances of con-
flict in the countryside and therefore may appeal to those studying political sociology
or modern forms of collective behaviour and social movements.
The text aims to equip students with the ability to critically examine social
issues relating specifically to rural areas, and also to encourage students to explore
the theory–method dialectic underpinning sociological studies of rural life. The
final chapter draws together the conclusions reached in each chapter to ask how the
legacy left by rural researchers can further our conceptualisation of the discipline
of rural sociology. Fundamentally, the text challenges whether there is a future for
a ‘rural’ sociology and, if so, in what form it could appear.
The current research framework is positive for rural studies more broadly. The
£20 million joint funding initiative on rural economy and land use between the
ESRC, BBSRC and NERC is a demonstration of the importance of understanding
modern farming and also the social and economic lives of people in rural areas.
This is fully warranted in a context of significant reform of the Common
Introduction • 3
Agricultural Policy (CAP), the full impacts of which for the UK are yet to emerge.
Such a context of change highlights the need for rural research and this text seeks
to contribute to these ongoing debates.
The Structure of the Book and How to Approach the Text
The text assumes no prior knowledge or familiarity with sociological concepts;

each chapter progressively offers a series of key terms or vocabulary that will
inform the text as a whole. Therefore, newcomers to social science more generally
may benefit from an engagement with the opening chapters, in which key theoret-
ical and methodological terms are explored and defined. The more experienced
reader may move directly to the substantive chapter of choice, with the only
warning that the analysis in each substantive section is informed by the preceding,
emergent critical analytic approach. Those wary of theoretical commentaries may
look towards the chapter summaries, where these developments across the book
are most explicitly summarised.
The structure of the text follows a series of sociological analyses. The first
chapter traces the beginning of urban/rural discussions, beginning with the clas-
sical commentaries of nineteenth-century theorists, such as Ferdinand Tönnies,
Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, and the growing perception of significant dif-
ferences between urban and rural societies. The chapter then concentrates upon the
UK context and the challenge to the urban–rural bipolar model by scholars such
as Ray Pahl. Pahl’s work and a number of authors responsible for championing
rural sociology, such as W.M. Williams and most notably Howard Newby, take the
chapter into the late twentieth century. The chapter considers their work, the impli-
cations of the decline in agriculture as the key employer in rural areas, counter-
urbanisation and the phenomenon of the suburbs. The absence of rural research in
one of the first American departments of sociology is also briefly considered and
the growth of rural sociology in the 1930s and its emphasis upon social policy and
empirical research are described. The nature and meaning of the ‘rural’ in con-
temporary Britain are explored through an evaluation of early community studies
(Williams 1963) and more explicitly rural studies (Newby 1977a, 1985). The
chapter concludes by considering the most prolific sociological and comprehen-
sive contributor to rural sociology – Howard Newby – most notably his Deferential
Worker (Newby 1977a) thesis. Comparisons are made between rural studies and
developments in sociological theory (the interaction order) and method (qualita-
tive and ethnographic approaches to studying the social world) of this time. The
chapter finally considers the critical legacy laid down by Newby in his later works
(Newby 1978, Newby et al. 1978).
The second chapter brings us up to date by considering, in the light of the
absence of an explicitly rural sociology, the emergence of alternative theoretical
approaches in rural geography over the past thirty years. It considers the recent
‘cultural turn’ towards unravelling the theoretical, epistemological and personal
histories underpinning rural research via a selection from the work of eminent
figures such as Terry Marsden and Paul Cloke. Through Cloke (a geographer), the
text reflects the impact of the ‘cultural turn’ upon rural geography that has drawn
some inspiration from postmodernism and away from the overtly Marxist
approach that informed Newby’s later work and Marsden’s early contributions. The
rich legacy this work offers to sociology – despite sociology’s movement beyond
the impasse of postmodernism during the past decade – allows the relative theo-
retical and methodological strengths and weaknesses of various accounts in rural
studies to be viewed. The new territories into which they have taken rural research
are evaluated in the chapter’s conclusion.
Chapter 3 then marks the point at which the book considers more substantive
examples of contemporary rural debates and issues. This chapter offers a case
study of the impact of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) epidemic to
demonstrate the problems facing contemporary rural communities and the current
state of the countryside. This chapter will therefore appeal to readers in countries
also affected by the 2001 epidemic, such as The Netherlands, Ireland and France.
Rather than attempting to offer a definitive overview of what has become a sub-
stantial body of literature, it draws upon a selection. The selection reflects a variety
of conceptual and empirical approaches to the impact of the FMD epidemic. The
chapter argues that collectively, these quite varied studies serve to offer many
dimensions of understanding a profoundly complex issue. As rural areas have
become more intricate in the twenty-first century, rural research has produced the-
oretical and empirical innovations in order to best capture the rural’s complexity.
Chapter 4 continues the text’s application of case studies to explore a substan-
tive issue in the contemporary countryside. It focuses upon a contested issue, that
of the hunting debate. Again, a sample is drawn from the literature, although the
question of hunting has not attracted the same level of attention as the impact of
FMD. The sample is purposefully diverse and includes government or research
council funded projects by Milbourne and Cox, an analysis of hunting as a new
expression of rural protest by Woods and new data looking at the expressions of
rurality underpinning the position of pro- and anti-hunting lobbies by the author
and also Burridge. Finally, a more traditional analysis of the economic contribu-
tion – or lack thereof – to the UK is evaluated. The conclusion of the chapter raises
some questions as to how rural researchers have approached contested issues in the
countryside.
Chapter 5 considers the topical question of game shooting in the UK. It evalu-
ates how game shooting has been studied by a relatively scarce research literature.
It considers both a sample from recent academic studies and also a report by a
leading opponent of shooting. The debates surrounding game shooting share many
characteristics with that of hunting and many fall outside the remit of the social
Introduction • 5
sciences, for example ecological work. The chapter explicates pro, anti and aca-
demic analyses and also studies that on a surface level seem unconnected but raise
highly relevant and related questions. The chapter’s conclusion suggests that the
social aspects of shooting have been neglected and it posits a few methodological
approaches that could make such a contribution. It also questions whether the rel-
ative neglect of game shooting by the academic community is a result of excessive
political correctness.
Chapter 6 continues the themes of chapter 5 in its advocacy of new method-
ological techniques for engaging in rural research. It outlines alternative methods
from which to engage with the rural in contemporary society. It presents two dif-
ferent analyses of visual representations of the rural and critiques and evaluates
whether the visual is a useful addition to the portfolio of research methods avail-
able to the rural researcher. The examples it uses are from children’s literature and
a photographic data set of gamekeeping work. Whilst not as holistic in the picture
that they provide as some of the literature sampled in previous chapters, they nev-
ertheless offer opportunities to challenge the taken-for-granted perception of
rurality. Such an approach offers one way to ensure that a sociology of the rural
avoids theoretical and methodological stagnation.
The text concludes by drawing the debates in the preceding chapters together
and looks, in an overview, at the future of rural sociology. It considers, in the light
of the preceding discussion and case studies, whether sociology has a contribution
to make to rural studies and what principles could inform such a sociology. Has
sociology changed in the 100 years since the first analyses of rural societies
emerged to the degree that one should now speak of rural sociologies? What future
direction could a future sociology of the rural pursue?
Learning Tools
The text offers a series of learning tools at the end of each chapter to enable stu-
dents to self-assess their knowledge. These take the form of a number of questions,
brief biographies of key thinkers and their ideas and a glossary of key terms as
they emerged. The questions will invite students to compare and contrast the
research styles and findings of rural research and thinking since the nineteenth
century and, in doing so, invite them to progress their knowledge and under-
standing of the field as a whole.
–1–
‘A Problem in Search of a Discipline’

(Hamilton 1990: 232):
the History of Rural Sociology
Tönnies and Nineteenth-century Commentaries on the Rural
Tönnies’s (1955) [1887] seminal work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, is often

appealed to as a starting point from which to begin to theorise the rural, indeed, to
the extent that Newby (1977a) labels him the father of rural sociology – albeit
whilst also perceiving him to be the father of the community studies approach.
Tönnies’s writing, in retrospect, can be seen as part of the new emerging discipline
of sociology, which itself was influenced by the impact of the agricultural revolu-
tion. Tönnies’s work therefore provides a useful starting point from which to view
how rural societies have been characterised by sociologists in the past.
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936)
The context of the second half of the nineteenth century and what came to be
termed the industrial revolution1 presented a challenge for the very earliest soci-
ologists: namely, how was society understood before the transformation; and how
could it be best conceptualised subsequently? Tönnies was writing in a context of
the emergence of sociology as a discipline in its own right, alongside significant
figures such as Hegel, Comte, Spencer and Marx. However, Tönnies is perhaps
best situated among the second wave of writers to emerge in the new field of soci-
ology. In France, his peers included Emile Durkheim and, in Germany, Simmel and
Weber.2
Tönnies characterised the rise of urban industrialism – and its associated demo-
graphic shift from the country to the city – as involving a loss of community. His
text, published in 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft applied these two, twin
terms to describe the contrast between pre-industrial and post-industrial societies.
The rise of the urban city was instrumental in this process:
6
The History of Rural Sociology • 7
one could speak of a Gemeinschaft (community) comprising the whole of mankind …

But human Gesellschaft (society) is conceived as mere coexistence of people inde-
pendent of each other.
(Tönnies 1955 [1887]: 38)
So, immediately, Tönnies’s (1955) analysis contained a critique of the impact of

industrialisation upon social relations. That is, the disruption of removing people
from the familiar context of the rural to the anonymity of the city led, inevitably,
to a loss of interactional associations between social factors. The cumulative effect
of this was, for Tönnies, Gesellschaft. Tönnies’s concept of Gesellschaft refers to
the large-scale, impersonal, calculative and contractual relationships that,
according to Tönnies, were increasing in the industrial world at the expense of
‘community’ or Gemeinschaft. The latter was more than familiarity and continuity,
but also:
a totality which is not a mere aggregation of its parts but one which is made up of these
parts in such a manner that they are dependent upon and conditioned by the totality …
and hence as a form possesses reality and substance.
(Tönnies 1955 [1887]: 40–41)
The two, twin concepts therefore invite points of contrast and comparison that
can be, loosely, characterised as shown in Table 1.
Table 1 Tönnies’s (1955) twin concepts of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
Gemeinschaft Gesellschaft
Community Society/association/organisation
Real, organic life Acts as a unit outwardly
Acts as a unit outwardly Imaginary and mechanical structure
Intimate, private and exclusive living Public life – it is the world itself
together One goes into it as a strange country
Bound to it from birth Mechanical
Organic Exists in the realm of business, travel or sciences
Should be understood as a living Commercial
organism Transitory and superficial
Old New as a name as well as a phenomenon
Pre-industrial Post-industrial
Responsible for the decline of ‘community’ in the
modern world
Unravelling these concepts in a little more depth, however, allows some insight
into whether Tönnies’s (1955) analysis was indeed a critique of industrialisation,
or rather a balanced account in which the respective advantages and implicit
problems associated with each form of social relations are present. In relation to
Gemeinschaft, social relationships were defined as intimate, enduring and based
upon a clear understanding of each other’s individual position in society. That is, a
person’s status was estimated according to whom that person was, rather than what
that person had done. However, such relationships were relatively immobile, both
geographically and socially (up and down the social scale). Therefore, in that
respect, status was ascribed (that is, relatively fixed at birth) rather than achieved
(based on merit or performance). The Gemeinschaft society, as characterised by
Tönnies (1955), was therefore less a meritocracy than a relatively closed commu-
nity. As Lee and Newby (1983) noted, such societies were relatively homogeneous,
since well-recognised moral custodians, such as the church and the family,
enforced their culture quite rigidly. Sentiments within this form of society placed
a high premium on the sanctity of kinship and territoriality. At its core,
Gemeinschaft was the sentimental attachment to the conventions and mores of a
‘beloved place’ enshrined in a tradition which was handed down over the genera-
tions from family to family and therefore both the church and the family were
more important and much stronger in pre-industrial society. Derived from this
form of social relations were enduring, close-knit relationships, which were in turn
characterised by greater emotional cohesion, greater depth of sentiment and
greater continuity – and hence were ultimately more meaningful.
In summary, Gemeinschaft implied close ties – both economic and emotional –
to one geographic locale, but at the same time these were closely intertwined with
a depth and richness in personal social relations.
In contrast, Gesellschaft was, broadly, everything that Gemeinschaft was not.
The move towards industrialism and urbanism, for Tönnies, was associated with
an increase in the scale, and therefore the impersonality, of society. This imper-
sonality enabled social interaction to become more easily regulated by contract (as
opposed to obligation and expectation), so that relationships become more calcu-
lative and more specific. However, they were also more rational, in the sense that
they were restricted to a definitive end and constructed with definite means of
obtaining such ends. That is, social relations were laid bare under a contract
system and the implicit web of obligations and ties of Gemeinschaft negated by the
explicit brokering of work and roles.
However, as a consequence the associational qualities of Gemeinschaft were also
negated and most of the virtues and morality of ‘community’ were lost under indus-
trialisation. Therefore Tönnies’s (1955) is a critique against the utilitarian’s society
of rational individuals: that is, that individuals, once disconnected from the close
form of association to be found prior to industrialisation, lost the stability or moral
centre that characterised the Gemeinschaft way of life. Writ large, the replacement
of Gemeinschaft by Gesellschaft relationships was ultimately a prerequisite of the
rise of capitalism and hence of the rise of nineteenth-century industrial society. In
this sense, Tönnies (1955) provided an early critique of the impact of capitalism
upon human forms of association – the impact of macro structure change as

analysed in terms of its impacts on the meso level. The importance of Tönnies’s
contribution to sociology, and rural sociology more explicitly, is therefore closely
aligned to the historical timing of his work. Tönnies’s own writings (across the years
1880–1920) were of a time when sociological writing was university-based, and
little interaction or dialogue took place between countries (with the exception of
America), unlike the present day. Nevertheless, there were also significant com-
mentaries on the rural stemming implicitly from his contemporaries’ work.
Durkheim’s concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity, Weber’s lecture on cap-
italism and rural society and early American sociology’s urban orientation and the
developing emphasis upon social policy are briefly considered here.
Durkheim’s Distinction between Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

(Distinctions between Rural and Urban Societies)
Durkheim’s concepts of organic and mechanical solidarity contain many parallels

with Tönnies’s concepts of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Tönnies developed his
concepts many years before Durkheim’s (1984) [1893] The Division of Labour in
Society and, as such, arguably informed Durkheim’s later concepts of mechanical
and organic solidarity.
Durkheim is often seen as a one of sociology’s more conservative thinkers, par-
ticularly when contrasted with Marx. However, Craib argues, ‘he was nevertheless
a reforming liberal or socialist in political terms’ (Craib 1992: 14). Durkheim’s
methodological approach or position as to the correct approach to the study of
sociology is beyond the remit of this book, although this clearly informed the con-
cepts and distinctions that emerged from his work.3 Two of the most notable of
these are his distinctions between mechanical and organic solidarity. These con-
cepts are discussed in his text on the increasing division of labour to be observed
in capitalist society. Mechanical solidarity in primitive societies was based on the
common beliefs and consensus found in the collective consciousness. The new
form of order in advanced (capitalist) societies is based on organic solidarity. This
was based on interdependence of economic ties arising out of differentiation and
specialisation within the modern economy.
The context, like that of Tönnies’s time, was the period of change following the
industrial revolution in Britain and Europe and its impact upon social relations.
Durkheim, like Tönnies, perceived this to have effected an ‘evolutionary change in
society from one form of social cohesion to another and in particular the role of
individualism in modern societies’ (Craib 1992: 15). However, unlike Tönnies,
Durkheim did not perceive such a shift with the sense of pessimism implicit in
Tönnies’s interpretation. Rather than the shared beliefs which Durkheim perceived
traditional (i.e. pre-industrial revolution) societies to characterise, the division of
labour in people’s working lives formed a new bond or contract between social
actors. That is, the division of labour created economic dependence upon one
another and this formed the new social bond and maintained the equilibrium.
There is a danger of confusing Durkheim’s emphasis upon the division of labour
as taking upon the same significance as Marx’s emphasis upon the ownership of
the means of production. Unlike Marx, Durkheim does not take the economy to be
the driving force of his analysis of social relations. However, the core ontological
assumption underpinning his analysis of society was that a shared moral basis was
necessary to the social order (that is, to ensure the continued smooth running of
society). Somewhat confusingly, Newby (1980) reflects on Durkheim’s use of
mechanistic and organic descriptors, and finds organic more evocative of a rural
way of life:
The use of the word ‘organic’ emphasizes the elision between the aesthetic and the eco-
logical on the one hand and the social on the other. It obviously derives in part from its
connotations with the land and fertility.
(Newby 1977a: 16)
There are, perhaps, a few reasons underpinning Newby’s (1980) interpretation,

which inverts the romanticised view of traditional ways of life as synonymous with
the rural. First, Durkheim was, to borrow Craib’s (1992) term, ‘drunk’ on the
concept of society. Society was, in this sense, the new, modern, industrial society
that he sought to analyse and explain, rather than the traditional, pre-dating
society. Therefore, the more positive, consensus-based modern society may trans-
late more positive characteristics. The other, and perhaps more interesting in rela-
tion to the concern here with rural sociology, is the more explicit continuum
visible between rural and urban in Durkheim’s analysis. Craib offers a useful
summary:
Strictly speaking ‘mechanical solidarity’ is not itself a form of social structure but it is
the form of solidarity found in ‘segmented societies’ – societies originally clan
(kinship) based but later on based on locality.
(Craib 1992: 66)
Here the emphasis is upon geographic locality and a type or form of social rela-
tions. This is far more explicit than is the case in Tönnies’s analysis, as will later
be discussed with reference to the work of Ray Pahl. In the work of Durkheim,
therefore, we can detect an emphasis upon locale as a significant influence upon
the social characteristics of the society residing there. However, Max Weber’s
analysis serves to take the notion of locale further, for in imprinting upon the cul-
tural values or outlooks of an individual it ultimately becomes removed from any
fixed geographical context.
Weber (1970) [1904] on Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany4
Weber’s (1970) commentary of rural societies is based on a lecture he delivered in

1904. Whilst the essay goes on to specifically address Germany rural society (in
particular the differences between the social formations of the east and west) he
discusses the condition more broadly, including the English and American situa-
tions as well as that of mainland Europe. Weber argues that rural areas are dis-
tinctive and therefore that they warrant sociological attention:
Of all communities, the social constitution of rural districts are the most individual and
the most closely connected with particular historical developments.
(Weber 1970: 363)
Weber’s (1970) approach is therefore historical in his attempt to capture the

complexities of the phenomena of rural societies. Like Tönnies, he finds that the
rural is in decline:
For a rural society, separate from the urban social community, does not exist at the
present time in a great part of the modern civilised world. It no longer exists in
England, except, perhaps, in the thoughts of dreamers. The constant proprietor of the
soil, the landlord, is not an agriculturalist but a lessor; and the temporary owner of the
estate, the tenant or lessee, is an entrepreneur capitalist like any other.
(Weber 1970: 363)
The link between urban and rural (like Tönnies and indeed Marx) is the impact
and phenomenon of capitalism and its relative impact upon farming. The spread of
a capitalist ethic is Weber’s (1970) particular concern and the manner in which
land comes to represent not only agricultural opportunities but also social status.
To buy or own significant tracts of land, he argued, also acts as ‘an entrance fee
into this [higher or elevated] social stratum’ (Weber 1970: 366). However, Weber’s
(1970) interest lies in the shifts within agriculture within his own native country,
Germany. Particularly, his analysis focuses upon the differentiations of farming
intensities between east and west regions of Germany. He argues that the
increasing value and social status of land is significant:
by increasing the capital required for agricultural operations, capitalism causes an

increase in the number of renters of land who are idle. In these ways, peculiar con-
trasting effects of capitalism are produced, and these contrasting effects by themselves
make the open countryside of Europe appear to support a separate ‘rural society’.
(Weber 1970: 366–367)
He argues that this serves to differentiate between the old system of farming,
which could be loosely described as the old, economically independent aristocracy,
and the new urban capitalist emphasis upon the possession of money. The result is
a form of conflict, as ‘the two social tendencies resting upon entirely heteroge-
neous bases thus wrestle with each other’ (Weber 1970: 367). In this there are
many echoes of Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic societies.
The ‘rural community, aristocratically differentiated’ is akin to the mechanical sol-
idarity Durkheim associated with pre-industrial revolution societies (Weber 1970:
372). Even more particularly, ‘the density of population, the high value of land, the
stronger differentiation of occupations, and the peculiar conditions resulting there-
from’ are evocative of the organic solidarity that Durkheim argues exists in
modern industrial societies (Weber 1970: 372).
However, the pessimism in the shift that Tönnies, Durkheim and Weber trace is
not necessarily framed in negative terms in the interpretation offered by Weber. For
example, ‘the former peasant is thus transformed into a labourer who owns his
means of production, as we may observe in France and in southwestern Germany’
rather than the preceding situation where they were owned or ascribed a status by
the lord of the manor or Junker (Weber 1970: 367). In this sense, Weber’s (1970)
interpretation is less tinged with the nostalgia that has been perceived in Tönnies’s
work and, as the chapter will demonstrate, subsequent community studies.
The thrust of Weber’s (1970) argument lies in the social history he conducts of
Germany, rather than the inherent characteristics of the different regions them-
selves (although this is addressed to a certain degree). Weber argues:
The establishment of extensive operations was facilitated, for the eastern landlords, by
the fact that their landlordship as well as the patrimonialization of the public authori-
ties had grown gradually on the soil of ancient liberty of the people. The east, on the
other hand, was a territory of colonization.
(Weber 1970: 376)
Weber (1970) therefore suggested that the traditions of these two regions were
different and that, for example, these manifested themselves in the way the land
and peasants were managed. For example, the ‘eastern and western landlord dif-
fered when they each endeavoured to extort from their peasants more than the tra-
ditional taxes’ (Weber 1970: 376). The older, ‘mutual protection, the jurisdiction
of the community’ was a feature of the west. However, the result was that the east
was more resistant to development than the west and more influenced by old, aris-
tocratic traditions, the eastern farmer being more associated with a gentleman’s
lifestyle than that of working the land. Weber concludes, ‘for Germany, all fateful
questions of economic and social politics of national interests are closely con-
nected with this contrast between the rural society of the east and that of the west
with its further development’ (Weber 1970: 384). There is, therefore, the sugges-
tion that rural society is somewhat behind that of the new emerging forms of social
relations. However, this is to some degree countered in the very importance that
Weber attaches to understanding these differences and the way the rural is signif-
icant to his analysis. The rural, for his sociology in this lecture, is a significant
sociological concept for understanding social relations.
Having considered the European analyses of rural change offered by Tönnies,
Durkheim and Weber, the chapter now turns to consider, very briefly, the American
situation.
American Sociology
Newby (1980) addressed the issue of why rural sociology had become a vibrant
research field in the US context and not that of the UK. Newby (1980) found that
early American sociology was primarily urban in orientation and yet was then fol-
lowed by an emphasis upon rural issues from a social policy dimension. Most sig-
nificantly, Newby found it to be more reactive in its research than proactively
seeking to theorise the changes in rural society (Newby 1980), a criticism that has
also been levelled at more recent British rural research (Hamilton 1990). The dis-
cipline has developed on both sides of the Atlantic;5 however, it became more
community-based here and more oriented towards agriculture (at least initially) in
America. For a summary of the most recent analyses offered by US sociologists in
rural America, see Rural Sociological Society (RSS) (2005). RSS (2005) found
that (1) the rural population is becoming more diverse in terms of its advancing
age and increasing Hispanic population, (2) rural economies have been signifi-
cantly transformed in the past decade (in terms of increasing dependency on the
agriculture industry, declining manufacturing, increasing reliance upon service
industries and a lack of high-skill and high-wage jobs), (3) rural communities,
especially those within commuting distance of larger areas, are experiencing high
physical growth, which must be balanced with protecting the natural environment,
and (4) while new opportunities are being created in rural communities, poverty
persists at alarming levels relative to urban and suburban areas (Consortium of
Social Science Associations 2005).
The focus here is upon the UK context and the directions that UK rural soci-
ology has most recently developed. The particular concern is the long-term impact
of the decline in the significance of the rural for sociologists and its implications
for the future of a theoretically and methodologically sophisticated analysis of
contemporary rurality. Therefore, considering the importance attached to the rural
by key, founding thinkers in the history of sociology, why the rural has not con-
tinued to attract such attention warrants examination. This relates to the interpre-
tation, or legacy, of Tönnies’s work by subsequent sociologists.
Tönnies’s Legacy
The enduring impact of Tönnies’s work has been the two models of society (pre-
industrial and post-industrial). The twin concepts of Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft served to represent the profound changes sweeping across nineteenth-
century Europe and distinguish post-industrial revolution society from its more
feudal precursor. However, Tönnies’s analysis is generally perceived to be a pes-
simistic analysis of the consequences of these changes. That is, the breakdown of
traditional social order is implicitly feared, as Gemeinschaft is defined as an impor-
tant source of stability in society. Nevertheless, Tönnies’s concepts of
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft explored the transition from the ‘communal’
organisation of medieval society to the ‘associational’ organisation of modern,
industrial society. In addition, he sought to give proper sociological attention to the
creative and constructive role of individual action in producing its central cultural
values – in contrast to the anonymity of Durkheim’s model.
Re-evaluating Tönnies
The danger in interpreting Tönnies’s contribution lies in the ready links made
between his twin concepts and their relationship to urban and rural locales. The
automatic mapping of these two concepts along a rural–urban continuum is mis-
guided, as Tönnies was not referring to any particular social group (be it rural or
urban) when he wrote Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, but to forms of human asso-
ciation (Lee and Newby 1983). Rather, Tönnies (1955) was careful to argue that
both relationships could be found in rural and urban settings. The emphasis was
upon understanding how our sense of place depends upon social organisation and
it is this analysis that is significant as one of the earliest forms of sociology to
engage and unravel such a connection (Lee and Newby 1983). It is important to
understand that Tönnies’s concept of Gemeinschaft, although it included locality,
went beyond to encompass a type of relationship that could – at least potentially –
characterise the whole of society.
There are therefore a series of ambiguities and difficulties arising out of
Tönnies’s (1955) seminal work. In terms of theorising the rural, we remain in
something of a theoretical vacuum as fundamental questions remain as to the sig-
nificance of the rural for sociology. Nevertheless, several useful concepts have
emerged: locality, local social system and communion, although the exact nature
of their interconnections remains unclear. These concepts and the attention of
other important figures, such as Durkheim and Weber, in the development of soci-
ology make the rural worthy – if ambiguously – of sociological attention.
Rural Sociology following Tönnies
Tönnies’s concepts have been considered and the innovations in Tönnies’s

approach to the study of society, alongside other emergent conceptualisations of a
distinct rural society from Durkheim and Weber. Whilst neither a formally phrased
nor a fully theorised model of the rural has been promoted by such authors, what
is it in this legacy that later causes Newby to argue that rural sociology remains a
prisoner of its own history? At what point does this fault lie? Somewhat unfortu-
nately, it lies in the way Tönnies’s original concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesell-
schaft have been subsequently employed, which was alluded to earlier in the
chapter. Essentially, Tönnies’s intention that they describe forms of association,
rather than actual social systems, has been ignored and the twin concepts have
been taken as clear-cut, distinct concepts. Tönnies’s original emphasis holds that,
in purely formal terms, Gemeinschaft included any set of relationships charac-
terised by emotional cohesion, depth, continuity and fulfilment, whereas
Gesellschaft referred to the impersonal, the contractual and the rational aspects of
human association. However, by conceiving them as conceptually distinct, they
have become reified, that is, they ceased to be tools of analysis but rather became
viewed as actual social structures that could be observed and enumerated – and
verified through fieldwork.
Secondly, and as a result of this first point, the two concepts became identified
with particular settlement or geographic patterns: Gemeinschaft with the rural
village and Gesellschaft with the city. Whilst Tönnies had been largely careful to
regard the twin concepts as forms of association that, while differentially distrib-
uted across society, were present to varying degrees in all types of social structures
and organisations. Nevertheless, the sustainers of the rural–urban bipolar con-
tinuum are easily viewed through the rash of essays or empirical works that
mapped out the characteristics of ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ ways of life. Such studies
included Simmel’s (1971) [1903] ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the
Chicagoan Wirth’s (1938) ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ and Redfield’s (1947) ‘The
Folk Society’. More explicitly in the UK, the sociological community had devel-
oped its own set of sub-disciplines; the one most closely aligned with the rural also
shared an empirical emphasis and the restrictions of its own theoretical inheri-
tance. To update Newby’s observation, it was as if the early forms of rural soci-
ology were constricted in two senses: from Tönnies’s misinterpreted legacy and
from the inherent difficulties of the community studies approach. It is to the emer-
gence and the epistemological underpinnings of the community studies approach
that the chapter now turns.
Community Studies
Newby (1977a) finds Tönnies to be the founding father of rural sociology ‘just as
elsewhere I have described him as the founding father of community studies (Bell
and Newby 1971) … But then, it has always been believed that real commun-
ities were to be found in the countryside’ (Newby 1977a: 1333, fn. 9, original
emphasis). Newby’s identification that Tönnies is an important reference for rural
sociology and also for community studies research brings with it the ambiguities
in Tönnies’s work: that is the pessimism and sense of loss implicit in Tönnies – a
negative tone that is shared by the community studies genre. As Newby notes, the
community studies approach charted the decline of a ‘spirit of community’ and
such a decline offers an excuse to explain a whole host of contemporary social
problems. Therefore the sense of loss that made Gemeinschaft forms of associa-
tion so desirable is shared by the desire for community and for security and cer-
tainty in our lives – that is, for identity and authenticity that have been lost in a
modern industrial society. The implications of this use of Tönnies’s work are
twofold. First, the ambiguities of Tönnies’s analysis are also continued within the
community studies genre; essentially, what is actually meant by community (and
indeed how has it been ‘lost’)? Secondly, sociology as it emerged in the UK was
widely seen in Britain as a science for understanding and resolving social prob-
lems (Crow and Allan 1994). These were deemed largely to exist in the cities, and
to be concerned primarily with issues connected to housing, health and education
(Hamilton 1990: 229). The emphasis upon specifically rural research was there-
fore, almost by omission, seen as an unproblematic environment – a bucolic idyllic
way of life, far removed from the pressures of capitalism. The chapter now draws
upon some explicit examples – both modern and more contemporary – in order to
draw out some of the critiques that emerged relating to the community studies
genre.
The Emergence of Rural Community Studies
The most general of definitions identifies that the community studies approach
consisted of a range of studies conducted between 1940 and 1960. The history of
the approach has been addressed elsewhere (Frankenberg 1969, Bell and Newby
1971, Lee and Newby 1983, Crow and Allan 1994). However, Crow and Allan
(1994), as the most recent, are able to mark the distinctions between the decline of
community studies work and the plethora of studies conducted from the 1950s
through to the early 1990s and both in urban and rural locales (Crow and Allan
1994: xxiv–xxv). The focus of rural community studies preceding its decline in the
1970s was, as Lacey and Ball (1979) observe in relation to the sociology of edu-
cation, upon the changing social structure of Britain in the post-war period (Bell
and Newby 1971, Lacey and Ball 1979). Centrally, this concerned social class and
relied upon empirical research of, but not exclusively, rural areas. Lee and Newby
(1983) summarise these studies as sharing a series of themes: gaining a clear
picture of the place under enquiry; defining the social structure of the community;
examining change and whether it was perceived to be positive or negative; the loss
of the traditional social order (what could be considered to be Gemeinschaft). In
relation to explicitly rural studies, attention was focused upon working-class life
(the demise of traditional working-class community), through an investigation of
the centrality of family farming, a consequence of which was a neglect of the
locally powerful (Bell and Newby 1971). It is therefore possible to see that such
an approach ran the risk of offering an analysis that was more retrospective than
proactive in its attempt to theorise the rural. In effect, it has often been found to
offer more descriptive than critical accounts of communties.
This section uses a number of rural studies that have been identified as defining
examples of the genre and have shaped subsequent research in order to explore the
contribution of the approach to rural studies more generally. The studies are
Williams (1963), Pahl (1966) and Newby (1977a). Particular attention is paid to:
the focus of the individual studies themselves; the methodological approach
applied; the study’s historical context; and, finally, the study’s contribution to the
genre and towards the development of the theory of rurality.
Williams (1963)
Williams, along with Frankenberg (1957) and Littlejohn (1963) attempted a dis-
tinctively British form of rural sociology, albeit within prevailing the paradigm of
‘a rather functionalist “community studies” and its derivatives’ (Hamilton 1990:
229). Williams’s (1963) case study of ‘Ashworthy’ (a pseudonym) in the West
Country followed on from his earlier study of a rural village, ‘Gosforth’ in
Cumbria (Williams 1956), but the more mature work is the focus here. Williams
was a geographer by training, having studied under a founding contributor to
Welsh anthropology and the community studies genre, Alwyn Rees (Bell and
Newby 1971). Rees had already conducted rural research himself (Rees 1950) and
Williams’s work can be seen to have been influenced by that genre. The focus of
Williams’s (1963) study rested upon traditional themes of: landownership/occupa-
tions; population change (the exodus from the land); family and kinship; kinship
and social life; and religion/household type. Therefore the emphasis within the
study was upon studying the impact of demographic change – the detailed effects
of rural depopulation on family and kinship. The selection of the case study site –
what could be said to be the ‘typical’ English village – was conceptualised as one
with a population of between 500 and 700 and the concept of ‘rural’ defined as one
in which the village was underpinned by a primarily agricultural economy.
Immediately, it is the threat of decline (depopulation) and locale (a village in an

agricultural context) that are central to his approach.
The methodological approach of the study was necessarily concerned with the
detail and nuances of village life – or rather family life. Williams (1963) therefore
conducted fieldwork, in the summer of 1958, which included four individual
family case studies and a ‘map’ of one couple’s ‘kinship universe’, and he also
attended a funeral. The studies emphasised the importance of the landholding
system (for instance the problems of continuity of land ownership across same
family generations) as well as that of social class distinctions within the parish
itself. Bell and Newby (1971) evaluated that Williams gives ‘a fine analysis of
social class divisions in the community, but it is static rather than dynamic’ (Bell
and Newby 1971: 164).6 In this, Bell and Newby (1971) reveal one of the main cri-
tiques of the community studies approach – that it suffers from an excess of
description at the cost of analysis. The social impact of the changes Williams
(1963) details is not addressed, for example how social relationships within the
parish as a whole have changed as well as internal or family relationships (Bell and
Newby 1971).7 Bell and Newby (1971) then contrasted Williams’s (1963) with
Littlejohn’s village case study (1963). Whereas Williams (1963) found elements of
Gemeinschaft relationships and poorly developed class structure, Littlejohn (1963)
found an extremely hierarchical class system, in which relationships were imper-
sonal, contractual employer–employee relationships and therefore not charac-
terised by Gemeinschaft. Whereas Williams (1963) found change to be taking
place under the veneer of stability, Littlejohn (1963) perceived that social change
was not a result of urbanism and that social class was more important for the com-
munity as a source of identification. Littlejohn (1963) therefore benefited from his
more historical approach and framework, through which he was able to take the
view that national changes were impacting upon the local, rather than any
encroaching urbanism that underpinned Williams’s (1963) analysis.
Bell and Newby (1971) through the contrast with Littlejohn highlight the draw-
backs implicit in the mainstream community studies approach. Williams’s (1963)
Ashworthy study is an exemplar of the early form of community studies – its
strengths and weaknesses. Williams’s (1963) concerns were with a dynamic model
of rural development, in which a wide range of factors, both micro and macro,
were included and his approach was broad and multidisciplinary, rather than a
narrow and specialist focus. Such an approach was admirable in its scope, but nev-
ertheless in retrospect can be said to be something of a snapshot. For instance, the
modern ethnographer’s emphases upon immersion and long periods in the field are
both absent (Pole and Morrison 2003).8 However, there is a risk of evaluating
Williams (1963) using contemporary criteria, when his style of research was – for
its time – novel in its emphasis upon qualitative alongside quantitative material.
Indeed, if we consider Hargreaves’s (1967), Lacey’s (1970) and Newby’s (1977a)
studies, considered to be exemplars of the early championing of qualitative
methods, they contain a much larger proportion of quantitative data than would
now characterise a contemporary ethnographic monograph (Hillyard 2003a).
Therefore the criticisms of the community studies approach, which are sum-
marised in table 2, potentially fail to engage with the objectives of the original
studies themselves. Rather, they reflect their own contemporary concerns and as
such ontological and methodological preoccupations. That is, they measure early
community studies work by benchmarks developed long after the studies.
Table 2 Criticisms levelled at the community studies approach to social research
Rarely multidisciplinary; geographer, economist and sociologist

Unsystematic use of methods
Largely descriptive
Non-quantitative
Impressionistic data
Inductive generalisations
Results specific to community studies
Non-comparable
Non-cumulative
Sources: Lee and Newby (1983), Crow et al. (1990) and Hamilton (1990).
The early community studies were informed by the then dominant paradigm of
the structural functionalist tradition of social anthropology, not the ‘new’ or inclu-
sive ethnography that now characterises small-scale ethnographic research (Harper
1998, Pole and Morrison 2003). If the studies are evaluated in this light – in their
historical place within sociology – some of their methodological vacillations can
be seen as more the refinement of the emergence of a case study approach for soci-
ology and that qualitative techniques had yet to acquire the status and sophistica-
tion they currently enjoy within sociology. Therefore, studies were concerned with
the ‘health’ of individual communities and few ‘have been used to examine the
theoretical presuppositions themselves’ (Newby 1977a: 96).
The Critique of Community Studies
Sociology as a separate academic discipline was itself forged in the nineteenth century
reaction to industrialization and urbanization of which the Romantic movement was a
part. It therefore accepted uncritically the prevailing view of rural society as a system
of stable and harmonious communities … much more attention was paid to urban
industrialism and its attendant social problems and evils. Thus in Britain academic
sociology developed out of the Booth and Rowntree tradition of urban poverty studies,
while rural poverty was virtually ignored; thus today urban sociology is a flourishing
area of the discipline, while rural sociology is almost non-existent.
H. Newby, The Deferential Worker (original emphasis)
Tönnies’s concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft originally referred to

forms of association, not types of settlement however, Tönnies had noted that, in
the rural village, Gemeinschaft ‘is stronger there and more alive’ (Tönnies quoted
in Newby 1977a: 95).
Thus Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were abandoned as concepts and became
reified into actual groups of people ‘out there’, which could be observed and inves-
tigated (Newby 1977a: 95)
Unfortunately, however, they were used largely to classify communities almost like so
many butterflies, and contributed to the low-level fact-gathering tendencies of rural
sociology, particularly American rural sociology.
(Newby 1977a: 95)
Pahl (1968)
In a series of key papers published in the late 1960s, Pahl offered a critique of the
importance of geographical locale and its correspondence to particular forms of
social relations. Pahl doubted the sociological relevance of the physical differences
between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ in advanced industrial societies. Fundamentally, Pahl
posited that no sociological definition of any settlement type (or locality) could be
formulated. Therefore, any notions of a rural–urban or any other locality-based
continuum are destroyed. As such, he considered the concepts of ‘rural’ and
‘urban’ to be neither explanatory variables nor sociological categories. He used
evidence from his own empirical research community studies to show that, far
from an exclusive continuum from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, relationships of
both types could be found in the same localities. As a result, in a key paper Pahl
(1968) [1966] came to doubt the very value of the notion of a continuum even as
a classificatory system:
For a time these polar typologies, some sanctified with the authority of the founding
fathers, served as a justification for those who have been guilty of … ‘Vulgar
Tönniesism’ of the ‘uncritical glorifying of old-fashioned rural life.’
(Pahl 1968: 265)
Pahl’s (1968) analysis was informed by a different set of concerns from that of
Tönnies, that is, more contemporary sociological concepts. Sociology, as well as
establishing itself in the universities in the 1960s, had recognised the importance
of social class for influencing social actors’ experiences and, indeed, their very life
chances. Pahl (1968) applied this new concern to the study of rural life and found
the emphasis upon locale, when analysed in relation to social class, lacked
explanatory power:
It is difficult to see how the features of size and density could possibly exert a common
influence on rich and poor alike.
(Pahl 1968: 267–268)
It was social class, rather, that was a key influence in determining the lifestyle
options available to social actors, rather than any characteristics inherent within a
rural area:
Class is the most sensitive index of people’s ability to choose, and that stage in the life-
cycle determines the area of choice which is most likely rather than of the ecological
attributes of the settlement.
(Pahl 1968: 268, original emphasis)
Expressed more simply, ‘only the middle class have the means and the leisure
to be able to choose “places” in which to live’ (Pahl 1968: 270). Pahl’s interest in
social class drew him into locating the issue of class with other key institutions that
shape social actors:
It seems to me that the sociologically most significant feature of this settlement type is
the interaction of status groups which have been determined nationally – by the edu-
cational system, the industrial situation and so on – in a small-scale situation, where
part of the definition of the situation, by the localistic cosmopolitan, is some sort of
social interaction.
(Pahl 1968: 276, original emphases)
However, any accusations that can be levelled at Pahl (1968) in relation to struc-
tural determinism are countered by his concern to place the individuals within the
social structure:
Whether we call the process acting on the local community ‘urbanisation’, ‘differenti-
ation’, ‘modernisation’, ‘mass society’ or whatever, it is clear that it is not so much
communities that are acted upon as groups and individuals at particular places in the
social structure.
(Pahl 1968: 293, original emphasis)
Pahl’s (1968) analysis dismissed the analytic usefulness of the rural–urban con-
tinuum. In its place, the proper object of sociological investigation and theoretical
concern, for Pahl, was that sociological analysis should concentrate on the con-
frontation between the local and the national and between the small-scale and the
large-scale:
It is the basic situation of conflict or stress that can be observed from the most highly
urbanised metropolitan region to the most remote and isolated peasant village.
(Pahl 1968: 286)
The direction of Pahl’s argument is that rural sociology could no longer afford
to consider the ‘rural’ sector in isolation from the rest of society. In doing so, and
eighty years after the publication of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies’s
tools of analysis had been restored to their correct ontological status. That is, Pahl
had divested them of their confusing association with locality (Newby 1977a).
Immediately, this would seem to suggest that there cannot be a specifically rural
sociology and that ‘any attempt to tie patterns of social relationships to specific
geographic milieux is a singularly fruitless exercise’ (Pahl 1968: 293). However,
this utilises a narrow definition of rural – as that of geographical or physical space.
Another conceptual direction within Pahl’s work (and pursued by Newby) suggests
a new theoretical direction for a rural sociology to engage. Certainly, rural soci-
ology that was defined by the study of those living in a rural locale that were asso-
ciated with an agricultural economy (such as Williams 1963) is problematic since
the disappearance of agriculture’s economic dominance in rural areas. That is, the
occupational basis of the rural population has become less homogeneous in all
advanced industrial societies. As a result, the subject of study and a core focus for
past rural sociological work have disappeared – what can be said to be rural is in
doubt. However, the solution is present in Pahl’s (1968) reference to ‘a village in
the mind’, to which newcomers expect the villagers to attend. In the event that they
do not, villagers are said to be to blame for the loss of the village community (Pahl
1965). This serves to open up some interesting directions for future work – if it is
not based on locale, but ‘the mind’ or cultural imagination of ‘the rural’. This
opens up the notion of community – in the new Web-based age – to a global scale.
It also, on an interactional level of analysis, allows a great detail of sociological
research to be done: what definitions of the situation come to be operationalised in
rural areas? Who occupy official positions and are able to impose their definitions
upon less powerful groups in rural locales? And with what consequence? These are
themes that inform the rest of the text. They are explored in chapter 3 through
FMD, in chapters 4 and 5 through country sports. Prior to this, the degree to which
Newby champions and then falters in taking this theoretical agenda forward is
examined. This then led the way to a new wave of rural research within social and
cultural geography in the 1990s and the twenty-first century – and a reinvigorated
theoretical agenda, albeit with methodological limitations. This also marks an
important shift between rural sociology and geography.9
Newby’s (1977a) Critique of Pahl
In his examination of Pahl (1968), Newby agreed with the importance of social
structures within the analysis, but argued that Pahl’s work that looked at demo-
graphic and economic differences between rural and urban was a misleading
‘substitute’ for the detailed examination of social structures. That is, Pahl (1968)
had himself fallen foul of overemphasising the importance of geographical

milieux. Newby perceived that Pahl was more interested in local/national con-
frontations. However, Newby took the view in retrospect that ‘rural sociology
could no longer continue to consider the “rural” sector in isolation from the rest
of society’ (Newby 1977a: 99). However, Pahl in arguing (rather than achieving
in empirical practice) that the physical locale of the rural was not sociologically
significant holds important implications. Newby saw that ‘a further consequence
of Pahl’s argument was to leave a theoretical vacuum in rural sociology which has
never been filled’ and an argument that remains valid for present-day sociology
(Newby 1977a: 99).
In this vacuum, Newby (1977a) does find that a marginal relevance continues to
be attached to the rural, in that geographic location may influence local social
structure, in relation to the constraints that it applies to that structure. Indeed, as
Newby (1977a) points out, Pahl’s subsequent work (Pahl 1975) on the city devel-
oped this point. Yet, ‘to paraphrase Pahl, there is no rural population as such; rather
there are specific populations which for various, but identifiable, reasons find
themselves in rural areas’ (Newby 1977a: 100). Newby (1977a) perceives that Pahl
may have overstated his case in this respect: that geographic milieu may define pat-
terns of social relationships through the constraints which it applies to the local
social structure – for example, the so-called ‘tyranny of distance’, that is, social
actors’ access to one another and to scarce material resources that are regarded as
commonplace in more densely populated parts of the country. Whereas Pahl took
the view that any connection between this local social system and its ‘rurality’ is
purely spurious, as it stems from the inability of the inhabitants to transcend the
spatial constraints imposed upon them, Newby suggested that if social institutions
are locality-based and if they are interrelated then there might be a ‘local social
system’ worthy of sociological attention – which may be called ‘rural’. Again,
there are a number of empirically identifiable properties if social relationships and
institutions are constrained in such a way as to render them locality-based. That is,
there may be a ‘local social system’ – or mostly self-contained community – where
spatial factors have some effect upon social relationships. This would constitute a
reasonable field worthy of sociological attention.
However, Newby’s argument located the problem or incapacity to a wider soci-
etal system of inequality and/or technological development, rather than something
specific to the locality per se. Therefore, in terms of creating an intellectually dis-
tinct field of sociological investigation, Newby pursued a more traditionalist
research agenda – but his doctoral research drew upon a more cultural analysis, in
which the definition of the situation and the rural is more conceptually significant.
Newby and the Deferential Thesis
Arguably Britain’s last10 rural sociologist, Howard Newby is significant in his

innovative application of the theoretical and methodological agendas of the day to
rural studies. Whilst he made no claim to have solved the problem of the defini-
tion of rural sociology, his research offers an important legacy. Newby’s most pro-
ductive period of research was during the early 1970s through to the late 1980s and
there are three general stages that warrant consideration before his work’s signifi-
cance for contemporary rural sociology can be evaluated. This section, necessarily
selective considering the scale of Newby’s output, considers his doctoral research
(later published as The Deferential Worker) and then later, more essayistic work,
which moved to comment more broadly on the rural (Newby 1985). The following
chapter moves to consider his last major empirical research project, conducted
with colleagues at Essex (Newby et al. 1978b) and which marked a shift in his the-
oretical orientation.
Newby’s theoretical model for his doctoral work was directly influenced by
Goldthorpe et al.’s work on the affluent worker (Goldthorpe et al. 1968a, b).
Goldthorpe’s core conclusions were that the working classes were not, despite their
relative affluence, becoming more like the classes above them. The significance of
the affluent worker study is that it identified a non-conflictual working class (as
opposed to the conflictual imagery of the traditional proletarians). The affluent
workers participated less in the community, held an instrumentalist approach to
their working lives alongside continuing to support trade unions and to vote
Labour. Newby applied this analysis to a rural setting, specifically the farm worker,
which was the focus of The Deferential Worker (Newby 1977a). It was therefore
the experience of long-term farm workers, rather than immigrant ex-urbanites,
which at the outset made The Deferential Worker more an occupational sociology
than a generic piece of rural sociology. That is, Newby’s conceptualisation of the
rural was not the direct focus of the study and in those terms successfully avoided
reifying the geographical locale of the rural as many previous rural studies had
done. The study is better classified as an empirical study into the theoretical
problem of workers’ false class consciousness than what can be said to characterise
the rural.
A distinction within his approach was his concern to examine social relations as
they played out at interactional level. As such, he addressed some of the difficulties
inherent in earlier community studies research but, more significantly, his analysis
was also informed by Raymond Williams’s (1973) work on the penetration of the
rural idyll into the British cultural imagination. Williams’s text, The Country and
the City (1973), is a critical analysis of the representation of the rural in literature.
The influence of Williams’s work is therefore implicit but a powerful influence
throughout Newby’s critical approach to rural studies and it served to take his
analysis beyond the accusations of descriptive narrative levelled at the community
studies tradition. Borrowing heavily from Williams (1973), Newby critiqued the
association of the English countryside with ‘harmony, settlement, virtue, retreat,
community, innocence, identity, retrospect’, which are then contrasted with a par-
allel set of ideas associated with the city (Newby 1977a: 17–18). Newby (1977a)
therefore shared Williams’s (1973) concern to cut through the nostalgic sentimen-
tality applied to the rural. For example, despite the tremendous change that can be
said to have influenced rural England, such as mechanisation, the break-up of large
landed estates since the First World War and significant rural depopulation, rural
England continues to occupy a reified status in the cultural imagination:
Ever since England became a predominantly urban country, rural England has been
regarded as the principal repository of quintessential English values … Its reputation
as the epitome of England’s green and pleasant land has been aided by thousands of
Constable paintings hung in department stores up and down the country.
(Newby 1977a: 11, 12)
Newby then applied Williams’s cultural analysis to the social situation of farm
workers and argued that ‘there has been a refusal to recognize the problem of rural
poverty in the midst of this splendidly bucolic existence’ (Newby 1977a: 12). His
analysis drew upon a variety of cultural references, such as popular fiction’s rep-
resentation of the rural workers (Gibbons 1986 [1932]), in which farm workers are
‘alternately ignored and caricatured in the public consciousness’ (Newby 1977a:
11). Newby’s approach is therefore an interesting combination of theoretical
agendas and concerns. On the one hand, there was Williams’s cultural analysis and
on the other the influence of Goldthorpe’s more traditional, sociological, class-
driven agenda. When applied to the specific case of the farm worker, the combi-
nation served to penetrate the low-paid economic circumstances of the farm
worker and their definition and interpretation of their own situation. Newby con-
cluded that the myth of the rural idyll ‘has affected the agricultural worker’s inter-
pretation of his own situation, for a general cultural approval of the rural way of
life is something that an otherwise low-paid, low-status group of workers is
grateful to adhere to with understandable enthusiasm’ (Newby 1977a: 13). On a
theoretical level, he argued that the persistence of the rural myth interlinks with
‘important contradictions in unfettered capitalist development’ (Newby 1977a:
19). Applied to the rural context, for landowners ‘[it was] because social control
could be carried out on a personal, face-to-face basis that they were able to disas-
sociate themselves from the consequences of their own actions’ (Newby 1977a:
19). The combination allowed Newby’s (1977a) analysis to reveal that ‘the myth of
rural retrospect thus became, consciously or unconsciously, an agent of social
control’ (Newby 1977a: 19). It was unravelling the exact manner in which these
patterns continued to operate in agriculture in the 1970s that was the focus of
Newby’s (1977a) empirical research.
Newby (1977a): Locale and Methodology
His fieldwork was conducted in East Suffolk, a county with significant regional
variations to the extent that ‘no pretensions are made … to portray the life of the
“typical” agricultural worker – indeed this would be somewhat irrelevant since the
object of study is not a group of workers but a set of theoretical problems’ (Newby
1977a: 123). Whilst theoretical objectives can be seen to have informed the initial
focus of the study, its methodological application is remarkably distinctive from
the forms of social investigation dominant at that time. Newby’s (1977a) method-
ology was ‘deliberately eclectic’ and he drew upon historical sources such as the
agricultural and population census statistics, historical sources (both documentary
and oral) and participant observation in addition to his own social survey (Newby
1977a: 123). In total, Newby interviewed seventy-one farmers and 233 farm
workers in forty-four parishes in central East Suffolk between the first week of
March and the third week of August 1972, during which he was resident in the
field. The balance between the relative statuses accorded to these methods within
the study warrants detailed examination:
In effect the survey and the period of participant observation increasingly came to com-
plement each other: insights gained from participant observation could be checked
against survey data; on the other hand much of this data could often only become
meaningful through the experiences gained from living with a farm worker and his
family in a tied cottage for six months and gaining first-hand knowledge about the work
and community situation. As the period of fieldwork continued, the participant obser-
vation became more and more important as many of the shortcomings of using inter-
view material to obtain knowledge of relationships became apparent; nevertheless
‘doing a survey’ was a very good excuse for talking to farm workers and for prompting
them to articulate their feelings about their own experiences which would otherwise
have remained unstated.
(Newby 1977a: 123–124, original emphasis)
It is clear that there was a significant interplay between these methods; the
degree to which these methods informed Newby’s analysis as a whole is more
opaque.11 That is, whilst the appendices contain copies of the social survey and
Newby has written elsewhere about the fieldwork (Newby 1977b), his informal
and discursive – and on occasion narrative – style tends to blend his argument and
the results of his fieldwork in parallel. He concluded that farm workers and
farmers participate in a system of social control, which he termed deference. What
is significant about the deference thesis is that ‘behind the everyday rituals of def-
erential behaviour there have frequently lain attitudes and motives which are quite
the opposite’ (Newby 1977a: 111). The exact meaning applied to deference by
Newby (1977a) also warrants detailed explication:
‘Deference’ is generally reserved to explain at least this minimal commitment to ‘defer-

ential’ forms of behaviour – otherwise ‘quiescence’ would suffice. However, differenti-
ating deference from quiescence is far from easy, and not a problem to which sociologists
have paid much attention, preferring to take it for granted that power relationships will,
through some unexamined metamorphosis, automatically become moral ones over time.
These considerations have been highlighted by the work of Goffman to the extent
that they cannot be ignored. Goffman has argued that what is necessary for the possi-
bility of social interaction is merely an agreement on a definition of the situation which
enables the participants to select correctly from their total repertoire of status positions
and associated gestures and idioms. The process of maintaining this agreement is one
of skewed communication: over-communicating those gestures, actions, etc. – what
Goffman calls ‘demeanour’ – which confirm the relevant status positions and under-
communicating those which are discrepant. Goffman called this process as ‘impression
management’, which occurs while an individual is ‘on stage’. However, when the role
constraints are removed and the individual is ‘off stage’, only then can their identifica-
tion with their ‘on stage’ behaviour be assessed.
(Newby 1977a: 111)12
The contradictions the deference thesis allows Newby (1977a) to unravel

include the ironic observation that:
Many agricultural workers have seen their village overrun, as they regard it, by an
alien, urban, overwhelmingly middle-class population, variously labelled as new-
comers, immigrants, outsiders or, simply, ‘furriners’, who are viewed as having
destroyed a distinctive rural way of life and a close-knit community in which ‘every-
body knew everybody else’.
(Newby 1977a: 20)
Therefore, ‘it is the new urbanites, not the rural employers, who are blamed for
the declining rural way of life’ by the farm workers (Newby 1977a: 21). Indeed,
even the landowners themselves ‘share with their employees a quite sincere regret
for a state of affairs that they themselves, in responding to market factors, have
brought about’ (Newby 1977a: 20). Newby’s analysis permitted him to unravel the
nostalgia expressed by respondents in relation to their work, alongside a critical
appreciation that ‘sociologically agricultural workers are “rural” only because the
constraints of the labour and housing markets means that they must both live and
work in the same locality’ (Newby 1977a: 100). Newby’s analysis therefore
included the hierarchical authority structure of the farm and the highly unequal
distribution of rewards between employer and employees and how deference
serves to explain false class consciousness on the part of the farm workers con-
strained by their social situation. He identified a form of contractual bargaining or
negotiation between these two groups. He termed this as paternalistic authority,
which the landowners or farmers use to ensure the smooth running of the farm
through their everyday interactions with the farm workers. The significance of
Newby’s approach can be seen to be theoretical and methodological: the latter in
terms of the innovative use of qualitative methods and theoretical in terms of an
analysis of small-scale micro-interaction alongside a macro, Marxist-influenced
critique of capitalist relations. Newby reworked Goffman’s concept of the total
institution (Goffman 1961) into the notion of the ‘total situation’ in order to
capture the constraint and systems of exploitation facing the farm worker.
The deferential worker thesis was derived from fieldwork, but Newby’s later
work employed a more reflective, historical approach to further develop the
concept of deference and to locate the farm worker within the history of the
English rural village. So, whereas in early Newby ‘the analysis could be regarded
as a piece of industrial sociology’, his later work became a more overt form of
rural historical sociology and commentary (Newby 1977a: 100). The following
section considers one of Newby’s last sole-authored texts and then draws it
together with the deferential thesis to evaluate Newby’s approach and its potential
for subsequent rural studies.
Newby (1985): Change in the English Village
Newby here offers a different approach, which introduces no new empirical results
but draws together his own research to offer a commentary on rural society. The
text was more popularist in tone and adopted a more historical approach. Newby
argued that social changes were all rooted in change in agricultural industry – and
its decline – as ‘English rural society is no longer entirely, nor even predominantly,
an agrarian society’ (Newby 1985: 183), the result of which was that significant
changes had occurred in the social and occupational composition of rural popula-
tions who were no longer dependent upon farming for their living. Newby distin-
guished those dependent upon agriculture for employment as the ‘truly rural’ and
contrasted these with the ex-urbanite newcomers. The impact of this latter group
also marked ‘changes in the economic and social organization of agriculture.
Social change in the village has therefore accompanied the upheavals in the nature
of agricultural work itself’ (Newby 1985: 183). Newby remained cautious in asso-
ciating this transformation with a decline of communion or a particular quality of
human relationship and meaningful social intimacy:
The village inhabitants formed a community because they had to: they were impris-
oned by constraints of various kinds, including poverty, so that reciprocal aid became
a necessity.
(Newby 1985: 154)
The focus of his analysis was upon the changing forms of association found in
rural areas. This text differs from his doctoral studies in that he unravelled the
historical legacy of the occupational community in order to contextualise its

decline. His analysis began with the period between 1846 and 1873 and the ‘rural-
izing’ process, in which the economic viability of much small-scale manufacture
and domestic handicraft declined and the production of goods was transferred to
the new system of factory production in the towns. The result for those workers
remaining in rural areas was, inevitably, that ‘farming was unquestionably the
mainstay of the rural economy. The population of the majority of rural villages was
therefore dependent upon agriculture for a living’ (Newby 1985: 157). The bond
that linked the village was not the rural location per se but employment. ‘Because
of its dependence upon a single industry the rural village formed what might be
called an “occupational community” ’ (Newby 1985: 157) (see table 3).
Table 3 Characteristics of the occupational community
Isolated, self-contained community

Fierce loyalty
Own customs and traditions
Sense of identity and morality
Sense of certainty, clearer boundaries over what was and was not acceptable
Sense of order and a sense of place
A definition of community in both geographical and social terms
The double-edge quality of the village in this sense was
(i) Security for some, but
(ii) A narrow and restrictive prison for others, ‘shackling the individualist by the vicious pur-
veyance of gossip and innuendo’ (Newby 1985: 157)
Source: Newby (1985).
In his critique of social relations in the English village, Newby catalogues the
class relations that underpinned the chronic poverty and cruel exploitation of
workers in rural locations. The analysis draws in the importance of the physical
organisation of land and its social consequences:
the settlement pattern, with most villages consisting of the dwellings of agricultural
workers and with the farmers scattered around the parish on their own farms but away
from the centre of the village itself … therefore, the employers, whether farmers or
landlords … were not part of the rural village community.
(Newby 1985: 159)
The physical separation of worker and landowner created a distinct community

among those resident inside the English rural village:
there was another community, a locally based working-class subculture, which

excluded ‘them’ in authority. This subculture represented the core of the occupational
community. It was basically a neighbourly association of kin and workmates, not dis-
similar to that which existed in many urban working-class neighbourhoods, but which
the outsider could find virtually impenetrable. It was sustained by the isolation of the
rural village, by the strong kinship links between the village inhabitants and by the
need for cooperation in times of family crisis … it was forged out of the overlap
between workplace and village … relationships established at work spilled into leisure
hours … the accepted code of behaviour … followed in the village also applied in the
work situation.
(Newby 1985: 159–160)
So the rural village was an extremely close-knit society, in which social

ostracism and gossip became extremely powerful ways of enforcing the values and
standards of village life. Status and prestige, unsurprisingly, are not entirely
derived from the world of work, so here the semi-public arena – the village pub –
becomes all-important as a site where work and the social life and news of the
village is discussed. The implications of this form of local social system and the
social relations within it hold implications for the farm worker. ‘The integration of
the farm worker into this occupational community meant that it was his prestige
among his fellow workers and neighbours that mattered most to him’ (Newby
1985: 161). This was based on a combination of work-based status and commu-
nity-derived prestige. For example, botching the task of ploughing a field would be
visible to all for the next six months so, as Newby (1985) points out, ‘pride in the
job’ was not based entirely on altruism.
The analysis Newby (1985) provides into this time period possesses two distinct
groups: working-class farm workers and the locally powerful, such as farmers and
landowners. Conflict between these two groups, whilst rarely rising to the surface,
was visible in ‘covert expressions of resistance’ and the rural underworld of arson,
poaching and ‘subversive talk in the tap house’ (Newby 1985: 162). Drawing upon
the deferential thesis, Newby highlighted the importance of the local landowner’s
paternalism model of management, which served to smooth over divisions
between the two groups. That is, the ethic of the country gentleman or paternalism
of the local squire could be exchanged for the deference of local workers. For
example, charity and ostentatious acts of generosity accorded to the whole village
encouraged respect and gratitude. ‘Gifts were the knots which secured the ties of
dependence … community, as an ideology, was a gloss that was placed upon the
very rigid and authoritarian divisions within the village’ (Newby 1985: 163).
Newby’s (1985) analysis then moved to consider the early part of the twentieth
century, from 1912 onwards, and the invention of the internal combustion engine.
The context was one in which the drift from the land of agricultural labour con-
tinued and urbanisation also increased. However, this time period also marked a
point at which commuting from a village to an occupation outside the village
locale became a possibility. The attraction of the countryside for the new
phenomenon of the commuter included cheap housing (until the 1960s) and
the continuing idealisation of rural life. Whereas in the epoch detailed by Newby
in the earliest phases of the industrial revolution there had been a two-tier social
class structure, this shift introduced a new group into the existing occupational
community.
Newby (1985) detailed the manifold impact of this new group, newcomers who
work in the towns, for rural villages. First, they brought with them an urban,
middle-class, lifestyle, which was alien to the remaining agricultural population. As
a result, newcomers did not make the village the focus of their social activities and
they continued to make use of urban amenities whilst living in the village.
Therefore both entertainments, socialising and even shopping tended to take place
outside the village. In summation, ‘the newcomer does not always feel it is neces-
sary to adapt to the hitherto accepted mores of the village’ (Newby 1985: 165), the
result of which was that it soon became clear that everybody did not know every-
body else. Ultimately, a new social division emerged within the village. Newby
(1985) detailed this as consisting of members of the former occupational commu-
nity retreating in among themselves, that is, becoming a form of community within
a community. Newby (1985) terms this as an encapsulated community, which is
resistant to any intimate contact with the commuters and second-home owners who
increasingly comprise a substantial proportion of the rural village population.
The most important distinction Newby then went on to demarcate were two new
points of contact and resentment: (1) housing and (2) the environment:
Newcomers regard the countryside in primarily aesthetic and recreational terms …

They tend to be unappreciative of the farm worker’s skills, not out of malice, but
because they simply lack the detailed knowledge of agriculture on which to base a
judgement.
(Newby 1985: 168, 169)
The result of this shift was that ‘the criterion by which a farm worker could once
obtain high status – skill at work – is therefore threatened with being overthrown’
(Newby 1985: 169). In its place, Newby (1985) argued, was conspicuous con-
sumption, that is, the urban basis for allocating status. The implication for those in
the village remaining dependent upon farm wages was that they were simply
unable to compete in the new differentials of size of house, car, consumer durables,
furnishings and garden. The response of the farm worker, Newby argued, was to
be the emergence of a new scale or hierarchy within the village:
The agricultural worker, however, reacts to the possibility of being deprived of his
former status in his own village by changing the rules of the competition … The basis
of length of residence is one of the few ways in which local workers can retain any of
their old status in the village.
(Newby 1985: 169)
Writing over twenty years ago, the relevance of Newby’s (1985) work for con-
temporary sociology needs to be evaluated and his analysis of the characteristics
of rural villages examined for relevance in the twenty-first century. Newby’s work
can be assessed on three levels, that of theory, method and the legacy his work
holds for capturing the complexities of rurality. His early work was characterised
by a neo-Weberian theoretical approach (see The Deferential Worker), which was
then followed by a Marxist, structural analytic approach13 (see Property,
Paternalism and Power), while in his work in the 1980s a more conversational, and
broader reflection was offered that encompassed rural society more broadly than
his earlier work (Newby 1980, 1985). Newby’s turn towards a more explicitly
Marxist analysis (Newby et al. 1978a) is considered in more detail in the following
chapter – because this is not the most significant section of his contribution. His
theoretical shift away from the strong strand of interactionism in his earlier work
is an implicit critique of the lack of conceptual development within interactionist
approaches (Goffman 1983).14 However, it is the synergy of method and theory in
his earliest work that offers the more fruitful legacy. The role and status accorded
his empirical research and the methodological innovations it contained are consid-
ered first.
The context in which Newby (1977a) conducted his empirical research was also
significant, albeit seen only with the benefit of hindsight. The timing of Newby’s
fieldwork in the early 1970s coincided with and contributed to a historical shift
towards qualitative forms of research (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995, Pole and
Morrison 2003). Techniques, which had previously been the underdog to more sta-
tistically-orientated work, were moving to establish themselves as dominant
research paradigms in some sub-disciplines of sociology (Hammersley and
Atkinson 1995). Newby’s (1977a) inclusion of qualitative methods alongside
quantitative techniques, but with equal if not more emphasis, can be compared to
methodologies emerging more broadly at that time in criminology (Young, J.
1971), within the Sociology of Education (Ball 1981, Burgess 1983) and in the
sociology of work (Oakley 1974) and an interest in symbolic interactionism (see
Rock 1979). It was upon the basis of the close, rich interactional data and
emphasis upon verstehen within his account that his analysis was derived. Newby
has also contributed to the wave of more reflexive pieces on qualitative research
(in the Bell and Roberts collection). This therefore places Newby as one of the first
in a new wave of ethnographic researchers emerging within sociology.
The role of theory within his account is more problematic to evaluate. In terms
of his citations, there is a clear interest and continuity with the traditional
approaches to industrial or occupational sociologies dominating sociology at that
time, such as Lockwood’s Blackcoated Worker (1958) study. However, the
emphasis upon demeanour is clearly derived from Canadian sociologist Erving
Goffman’s influence. Goffman’s unravelling of a new arena warranting sociolog-
ical attention – that of the interaction order – is clearly responded to in The
Deferential Worker. That Newby applied his fieldwork to explicate the nuances of
face-to-face behaviour and interactional rituals as a means to critique the inequal-
ities maintained through such relations is clearly (and emotively) expressed in
Newby (1977b). Newby’s approach is therefore very much a powerful critique of
these relations as his more explicitly Marxist orientation in later studies. The
approach he employed in his early work borrowed heavily from the very moral
tone and critique often misinterpreted in Goffman’s work (Hillyard 2004) and
relied upon ethnographic research rather than narrative-style description. That
symbolic interactionism continues to operate at the margins of mainstream soci-
ology (Atkinson and Housley 2003) and that it defies easy definition or explana-
tion (Rock 1979) undoubtedly contribute to why Newby is often more associated
with Marxist approaches (Wright 2004a) than with Goffman’s interactionism.
Nevertheless, there are a number of absences that are notable within his
approach. These included the role and status of rural women, the elderly and young
people and children. The latter two groups have now been engaged in research
both as a deprived group within rural areas (Jones 1997, Leyshon 2002) and also
as an empowered consumer group (Pole et al. 1999). Subsequent rural researchers
(see Little 2003a, Leyshon 2004, Little and Morris 2004) have gone on to broaden
the number of issues and themes examined in rural areas to include young people
and women. There is now a wealth of literature on the role and status of rural
women. Twenty years on from Newby, whilst he remains an instrumental figure
within rural sociology, his influence has declined – or rather the relevance of the
rural for sociology more generally. This can readily be seen in the way that the
rural no longer features as an important element in introductory sociology text-
books (Fulcher and Scott 2003), whereas it had featured as prominently as the
urban (Lee and Newby 1983). Most centrally, perhaps: is the dilemma that Newby
did not resolve the difficulties inherent in attempting to define the rural – locale
continued not to feature as the most significant feature underpinning his analysis
as he shifted the focus on to rural Britain as a component of British life more
broadly and the economic, technological, social and political milieu of which the
rural is part. In that sense, the very relevance of ‘rurality’ remains open to ques-
tion. Perhaps most important of all at that time, Newby extended the debate to
include the concept of power and power relations inside rural areas – indeed, a
development that may be somewhat neglected in contemporary studies of rurality.
A salient feature of Howard Newby’s work as a rural sociologist was that he
eschewed the somewhat nostalgic, romanticised approach to the countryside that
had prevailed for so long. His work served to guard against the constant danger of
excessive nostalgia and the tendency to take a highly selective and somewhat rose-
tinted view of the ‘good old days’ for, in doing so, what actually has occurred and
changed may be lost. Yet, whilst bearing in mind those reservations, the very per-
sistence of this theme suggests we can’t dismiss it as mere nostalgia – what seems
to be underpinning it all is a critique of the present. It all seems to be an attempt
to articulate, albeit vaguely, the private troubles people experience in everyday life
in modern industrial society. This analysis up to the 1980s provided a context from
which rural studies emerged and highlighted some of the key issues and gaps in
these early approaches. Whilst there may be agreement that ‘community’ and rural
life are a good thing, surprisingly, there is little agreement over what they actually
are.15
Conclusion
The chapter has progressed the definition of the rural through the work of Tönnies,
contributions from the community studies approach of the 1960s and significant
critiques of that approach’s study of the rural made by Pahl. The innovations of
Newby’s approach to the rural and omissions in his approach have been discussed.
The conceptual shifts of how best the rural can be approached are now drawn
together, as a precursor to the following chapter, which considers key figures in
contemporary rural studies.
The three aspects of community have dominated studies of rural communities.
The first of these was implicitly a critique of modern industrial society and the
impact of modern society in terms of changing the structure and content of per-
sonal relationships. This is a pessimistic, negative analysis in which the impersonal
and dehumanising aspects of modern life and a sense of social dislocation under
the conditions of rapid social and economic change are emphasised. Community
studies under this approach have a clear empirical charge to establish a factual
basis for arguments about whether modern society does or does not suffer from a
‘loss of community’. The concept of community is employed as a means to cri-
tique modern industrial society.
A second analysis associated community with localised social relations. That is,
it also charts the decline of a form of relations, namely the importance of locality
in forming the basis of modern social organisation. It explicates the erosion of
small-scale and relatively self-contained lifestyles. The localised community had
limited contact with the outside world and control over the core necessities of life
– food, housing and employment – lay in local hands. Therefore, the lifestyles were
fairly autonomous and there was a greater diversity of local traditions and
customs.
The third echoes Newby’s concept of the occupational community, where
bonds had been established upon the basis of long-term residence, proximity and
shared employment patterns. As a concept, this is equally applicable to rural and
urban locations (see Wilmott and Young 1960, Bernard et al. 2001) and, for
example, could relate to the redevelopment of many inner-city areas. This serves
to highlight the importance of changing occupational structure as well as that of
geographic proximity. As such, the importance of the rural location per se
declines in importance compared with occupation patterns. The historical context

of the decline of the traditional industries that characterised England as the
‘workshop of the world’ during and after the industrial revolution is significant in
the pessimistic framing of such changes in terms of decline and loss. Returning
explicitly to the concern here with rural settings, the shift is one in which an
influx of ex-urban commuters into rural villages combines with the loss of former
agricultural workers as the dominant form of employment within the locality. The
result is that established patterns of village life – shaped around this employment
pattern – are disrupted. Within this remains the problematic concept of commu-
nity and its somewhat nostalgic definition. The desire for community seems to
symbolise a desire for personal and social fulfilment: community as representing
the good life, a utopian vision. In this sense, ‘community’ becomes a normative
prescription. That is, it expresses the values of an individual concerning what life
should be like (rather than what it actually is like). This demands that the loaded
concepts of rurality and community be reworked and a more sophisticated defi-
nition offered.
Collectively, the chapter has suggested that community or rurality defined as a
geographical expression, or a fixed and bounded locality that attracts a human set-
tlement in a particular local territory, is not particularly sociological. Rather it
needs to be viewed as a local social system, which represents a set of social rela-
tionships within a locality that can be studied. The social life of the area, the
network of interrelationships established between those living in the same locality,
should be explicated. However, nothing can be said about the content of those rela-
tionships, unlike Gemeinschaft, based on the unique qualities of that social system,
but it does allow some empirical research to be carried out. Finally, and potentially
most profitably, could be to approach rural and community studies as a type of
relationship. This incorporates a consideration of a sense of identity between indi-
viduals, levels of mutual identification, an examination of ‘community spirit’ and
– most importantly – the fact that this can be geographically widespread. We have
seen that community as normative prescription has too often interfered with
empirical description and that no systematic sociology of the community is yet
available. That the community studies approach is labelled here as a tradition,
despite recent studies (see Bell’s 1994 Childerley), is largely due to its decline in
fashionability. Such fashionability within sociology can be seen if the community
studies approach – by definition, an empirical one – is placed into the historical
paradigm through which the approach originated. The early 1960s community
studies projects (see Stacey’s 1960 study of Banbury) are informed by the struc-
tural functionalism characterising sociology at that time (Atkinson et al. 1993).
Studies, such as Stacey (1960) and earlier, more explicitly rural studies such as
Williams (1956), established rural sociology in a British context, based upon a
premise that where you live defines how you live. Neither has a tidy classification
to replace the rural–urban continuum been discovered – only a number of lines of
enquiry on the relationship, if any, between locality, social relationships and a

sense of identity (Donaldson et al. 2006, Pahl 2005).
However, associating such concepts with Pahl’s notion of a ‘village in the mind’
and Newby’s critique of the ‘national village cult’ (Newby 1977a: 17) allows media
and communication and transport improvements to be incorporated into the exam-
ination of social ties and the consideration of important issues in modern society –
of the nature and direction of social change. Therefore the relevance of community
studies work has served to trace how the rural has progressively been approached
theoretically and methodologically. Pahl’s (1968) work not only corrected the over-
exuberance of early readings, or misreadings, of Tönnies, but also was an instru-
mental part of a new wave of studies – both urban and rural – seeking to theorise
forms of association. This period of research, which can loosely be seen from 1950
to the early 1970s, has been termed by others as ‘the old tradition of community
studies’ (Crow et al. 1990: 248). However, the contribution of the key studies that
will be considered here in relation to the rural was instrumental in the new research
paradigm of qualitative research that emerged within sociology and blossomed
from the late 1960s onwards, but also in that it paves the way for an eclectic
approach to examining the rural that can be said to inform rural studies to this day:
the ethnographic turn. Sociology in the 1950s and 1960s had, largely, been charac-
terised by an interest in social class, leading Lacey to observe that social class, like
chips, came with everything (Lacey and Ball 1979). However, the manner in which
social class was empirically researched diversified in the late 1960s and 1970s
within a number of sub-disciplines within sociology.16 In the early 1970s, notably
announced at the 1970 BSA conference, a paradigmatic shift in the sociology of
education took place, with the emergence of a ‘new’ sociology of education, which
moved into new territories of exploring aspects of education that before had not
received critical attention (Young, M. 1971, Brown 1973). Features such as the cur-
riculum, interaction in the classroom and pupil–teacher interactions became critical
areas of investigation. Similarly, the UK was influenced by the distinction between
secondary and primary deviance made in the US and by the theoretical ideas of
symbolic interactionism (Rock 1979, Burgess 1984).
This chapter therefore serves to bridge the work of Tönnies with that of the
second wave of – more sophisticated – commentaries on the rural.
Chapter Summary
The chapter summarised the very earliest rural sociology and work of Ferdinand
Tönnies. It then considered Tönnies’s legacy and found that the manner in which
his ideas were understood and utilised in early community studies work was prob-
lematic. Such studies tended to overemphasise the sense of nostalgia for the loss
of community and the rise of the industrial age. Pahl’s work presented an impor-
tant antidote to that tendency. He and Newby from the 1960s onwards began to
examine the changes taking place in rural areas and to advance the concept of rural
sociology beyond a reliance upon geographic location. New concepts to emerge at
this time were locality, social relationships and a sense of identity.
These theoretical advances within the sociology of the rural were paralleled by
an increasing emphasis upon empirical fieldwork. This coincided with develop-
ments in the wide discipline of sociology where qualitative studies were ‘coming
home’ and symbolic interactionism was inspiring research in other sub-disciplines.
This enabled our understanding of traditional concepts such as social class to be
explored in new settings and through different social forms. Newby’s Deferential
Worker thesis is one such example. By the end of the 1970s, rural sociology rep-
resented an active and inventive research field – both theoretically and method-
ologically.
Learning Tools
Questions
1. To what extent did empirical research characterise the work of the rural com-
mentators discussed in this chapter?
2. In what era of sociological development would you place (a) Tönnies’s and (b)
Newby’s work? Which theoretical interests informed their writings?
3. Describe and critically evaluate Tönnies’s twin concepts of Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft.
4. How have social scientists re-conceptualised the idea of ‘the rural’ over time?
5. Pahl’s analysis of a rural–urban continuum merely returned Tönnies’s twin con-
cepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to their correct ontological status.
Discuss.
6. How does the community studies approach to the study of rurality differ from
Newby’s? Discuss with particular reference to their respective analyses of social
class.
7. To what extent does Newby’s work remain relevant for contemporary sociolo-
gists?
Key Thinkers and their Ideas
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) Son of a prosperous farmer. Dismissed from

Kiel University (1913–1933) by the Nazis for his attacks on their ideas. Argued to
be the founding father of community studies and rural sociology. His distinction
between ‘community’ and ‘association’ is echoed (in different ways) by Durkheim,
Simmel and Weber (see Craib 1992).
Howard Newby (1947–) A rural sociologist. Born and brought up in Derby, his
father was a skilled worker at the Rolls Royce factory nearby. Much of his aca-
demic work has been within the locality of East Anglia. Based at the Department
of Sociology, University of Essex between 1967 and 1988 as undergraduate, post-
graduate research student, lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor. Latterly,
Director and Chief Executive of the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC), Vice Chancellor of the University of Southampton and Chair of the
Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP).
Glossary
Community studies: approach to social research popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
Largely informed by structural functionalist theoretical assumptions.
Deferential worker: Newby’s conception of the farm worker and how, through
their work and social relations with their employers, they come to take on a pro-
work attitude.
Definition of the situation: Thomas’s concept that, if men [sic] define their situa-
tions as real, they are real in their consequences. This emphasises the impor-
tance of individual actors independently interpreting their social situations and
acting on that basis.
Gemeinschaft: community.
Gesellschaft: association.
Monograph: the report of research findings in a book.
Reflexivity: the monitoring by an ethnographer of his or her impact upon the
social situation under investigation at every stage of the research process (i.e.
not just in the field). See Atkinson’s (1990) quote under constructivism in the
glossary at the end of the book.
Rural geography: perhaps more geographically sensitive than rural sociology and
perhaps more oriented towards social policy, environmentalism and quantitative
techniques.
Rural sociology: sociological investigation of all matters rural. These need not be
purely defined geographically (i.e. within a given region or locale) but can also
be a ‘state of mind’ or definition of a situation. Rural sociology positions social
theory more prominently than rural geography.
Rural studies: social science research engaging with all matters rural.
Rural–urban continuum: a bipolar interpretation of society, in which the differ-
ences between urban and rural settlements is emphasised.

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The Sociology of Rural Life

The Sociology of Rural Life

Oxford • New York

© Sam Hillyard 2007

All rights reserved.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978 184520 138 8 (Cloth)

Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks

1 ‘A Problem in Search of Discipline’ (Hamilton 1990: 232) the

2 New Issues in Rural Sociology and Rural Studies 39

3 The 2001 Foot-and-mouth Disease Epidemic in the UK 67

4 The Hunting Debate: Rural Political Protest and the Mobilisation of

5 Game Shooting in the United Kingdom 110

6 Representing the Rural: New Methods and Approaches 135

Conclusion: the Future of Rural Societies and Rural Sociology 152

Rural Sociology Institutional Framework: Critical Masses of Rural

Glossary of Key Terms 167

1 Tönnies’s (1955) twin concepts of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft 7

2 Criticisms levelled at the community studies approach to social

3 Characteristics of the occupational community 29

4 Typology of East Anglian farmers 45

5 Service class sources of influence 55

6 Key thinkers and their ideas 63

7 Countries with outbreaks of FMD pre-2001 70

8 Amount of information for each type of audience 76

9 A selection of academic analyses of the impact of the 2001 FMD

10 Guardian representations of the march’s message 100

11 Themes underpinning the march reported in the Telegraph 101

12 A selection of the game shooting literature 111

13 Opinions of shooting 124

ALF – Animal Liberation Front

IHR – Institute for Health Research, Lancaster University, UK

Many colleagues directly or indirectly contributed to this project. They include

SHH, Lincoln, October 2006

The Structure of the Book and How to Approach the Text

The text assumes no prior knowledge or familiarity with sociological concepts;

‘A Problem in Search of a Discipline’

Tönnies and Nineteenth-century Commentaries on the Rural

Tönnies’s (1955) [1887] seminal work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, is often

Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936)

one could speak of a Gemeinschaft (community) comprising the whole of mankind …

So, immediately, Tönnies’s (1955) analysis contained a critique of the impact of

Table 1 Tönnies’s (1955) twin concepts of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft

upon human forms of association – the impact of macro structure change as

Durkheim’s Distinction between Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

Durkheim’s concepts of organic and mechanical solidarity contain many parallels

There are, perhaps, a few reasons underpinning Newby’s (1980) interpretation,

Weber (1970) [1904] on Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany4

Weber’s (1970) commentary of rural societies is based on a lecture he delivered in

Weber’s (1970) approach is therefore historical in his attempt to capture the

by increasing the capital required for agricultural operations, capitalism causes an

Rural Sociology following Tönnies

Tönnies’s concepts have been considered and the innovations in Tönnies’s

The Emergence of Rural Community Studies

Immediately, it is the threat of decline (depopulation) and locale (a village in an

Table 2 Criticisms levelled at the community studies approach to social research

Rarely multidisciplinary; geographer, economist and sociologist

The Critique of Community Studies

Tönnies’s concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft originally referred to

Newby’s (1977a) Critique of Pahl

had himself fallen foul of overemphasising the importance of geographical