During the 1980s many communities turned to grassroots activities to promote economic development, rather than relying on industrial recruitment strategies. We evaluate the characteristics of these projects, their benefits and costs, and obstacles they face in the development process. The data are drawn from a survey of more than one hundred communities in the United States. Self-development efforts do not appear to replace traditional rural economic development activities, but may complement them. Self-development activities produce a wide variety of jobs that (...) are taken primarily by local residents. The cost and availability of credit are major obstacles for self-development projects. Although self-development strategies should not be considered the primary economic development strategy for most rural communities, they do enable communities to build a more viable local economy. (shrink)

Recent debates over the persistence of family farms have focused on the importance of “naturalistic” obstacles to the capitalist development of agriculture. According to these arguments, the existence of these barriers in some realms of agricultural production precludes the development of wage labor. I argue, however, that in many instances these obstacles are based primarily on political factors. To demonstrate this thesis I illustrate how the tobacco program until recently has proved to be an obstacle to consolidation and structural change (...) in tobacco production. The tobacco program has conditioned the extent of technological development and structural change in tobacco production. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the tobacco program maintained a system of small-scale producers and discouraged technological change in the industry. Changes in the program in the 1970s and 1980s, however, have contributed to the rapid mechanization and structural change among tobacco producers. Many of the “obstacles” to consolidation were overcome not by technological change, but by weakened political support for the tobacco program. These results suggest that in addition to economic and technological considerations, we need to assess more carefully the political foundations of the capitalist development of agriculture. (shrink)

This research analyzes the overall arrest histories of persons aged 18-34 convicted for weapon-related deer spotlighting in Virginia during 1997 and 1998. Deer spotlighting, or "freeze-killing," is a specific form of deer poaching involving shining a deer with a spotlight for an easier kill. Defined as unsporting, freeze-killing constitutes animal abuse. This study isolated and compared arrest rates of white males - 90% of the sample in the present research - with estimated rates of a cross-sectional national sample of the (...) same race-sex-age combinations. Results showed that about two in five freeze killers had been arrested, more than one in five for a crime of violence. Freeze-killers had almost twice the rate for violent crime and almost three times the rate for property crime as the control group - after accounting for age and for the time at risk of arrest. The findings' direction is consistent with the recent literature and a "generality of deviance" approach, and support an earlier call to expand hypotheses about animal abuse to include other criminal correlates in addition to violence. (shrink)