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Rural Sociology Commons™

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Selected Works

Work, Economy and Organizations

Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Rural Sociology

Needs-Based Training And Online Resource For Managers Of Rural Festivals, Fairs, And Events, Eric D. Olson, Lakshman Rajagopal Mar 2019

Needs-Based Training And Online Resource For Managers Of Rural Festivals, Fairs, And Events, Eric D. Olson, Lakshman Rajagopal

Eric D. Olson

Festivals, fairs, and events (FFEs) provide rural communities with economic and noneconomic benefits. For the project described in this article, we conducted a needs assessment of Iowa FFE managers by surveying them about the challenges they face in event management and then used the results of the assessment as the basis for training sessions provided to rural FFE managers in five areas of the state and development of an associated event management resource. The resource can be used by Extension and outreach offices to provide local FFE managers guidance on managing FFEs. We discuss broader implications for Extension as well.

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Tackling The Participation Of Europe’S Rural Population In The Shadow Economy, Colin C. Williams, Ioana Horodnic May 2017

Tackling The Participation Of Europe’S Rural Population In The Shadow Economy, Colin C. Williams, Ioana Horodnic

Colin C Williams

To tackle the shadow economy, an emergent literature has called for the conventional
rational economic actor approach (which uses deterrents to ensure that the costs of engaging in shadow
work outweigh the benefits) to be replaced or complemented by a social actor approach which focuses
upon improving tax morale. To evaluate the relevance and validity of doing this in rural areas, we here report
face-to-face interviews conducted with 9,677 rural dwellers conducted across the 28 member states of the
European Union (EU28) in 2013. Multilevel logistic regression analysis reveals that both approaches significantly
reduce the rural shadow economy. When tax …

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Opting For Elsewhere: Lifestyle Migration In The American Middle Class, Brian A. Hoey Nov 2014

Opting For Elsewhere: Lifestyle Migration In The American Middle Class, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

"Do you get told what the good life is, or do you figure it out for yourself?" This is the central question of Opting for Elsewhere, as the reader encounters stories of people who chose relocation as a way of redefining themselves and reordering work, family, and personal priorities. This is a book about the impulse to start over. Whether downshifting from stressful careers or being downsized from jobs lost in a surge of economic restructuring, lifestyle migrants seek refuge in places that seem to resonate with an idealized, potential self. Choosing the "option of elsewhere" and moving as a …

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Gender Disparities In Self-Employment In Urban China's Market Transition: Income Inequality, Occupational Segregation, And Mobility Processes, Qian Forrest Zhang Dec 2012

Gender Disparities In Self-Employment In Urban China's Market Transition: Income Inequality, Occupational Segregation, And Mobility Processes, Qian Forrest Zhang

Qian Forrest ZHANG

This paper presents the first quantitative analysis of gender disparities in self-employment in urban China. It documents the extent of gender income inequality in self-employment. By disaggregating self-employment into three occupational classes, it shows the gender segregation within self-employment—women were concentrated in the financially least rewarding segment—and identifies it as a main source of the gender income inequality. It examines a range of determinants of participation in self-employment—family structure, family background, and career history—and how their gender-specific effects contributed to gender segregation. Although using data from a 1996 national survey, this study captures two key processes that shaped the structure …

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Place For Personhood: Individual And Local Character In Lifestyle Migration, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2009

Place For Personhood: Individual And Local Character In Lifestyle Migration, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

While drawing on literature of narrative interpretations of the construction of self and place-based, embodied identity, this article will explore the impact of invasive market forces on intertwined processes of person, self, and place-making. It considers how resources for these projects have changed in the face of translocal market forces and neoliberal ideals. Despite numerous proclamations of an essential placelessness to contemporary American society, place continues to be a basic part of the construction of the person. In fact, a variety of place-making practices are increasingly pursued as ways of negotiating tension between personal experience with material demands in pursuit …

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Book Review 19 The Third Chapter By Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, William C. Mcpeck Feb 2009

Book Review 19 The Third Chapter By Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, William C. Mcpeck

William C. McPeck

This is my personal review of the book The Third Chapter by Sara Lawrence Lighfoot which was published in 2009 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

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Worksite Wellness Best Practices, William C. Mcpeck Jan 2009

Worksite Wellness Best Practices, William C. Mcpeck

William C. McPeck

This presentation explored the issues of best practice as they relate to worksite wellness. Best practice resources were also identified.

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Pursuing The Good Life: American Narratives Of Travel And A Search For Refuge, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2008

Pursuing The Good Life: American Narratives Of Travel And A Search For Refuge, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

September 11th 2001 helped create a sense of ever-present risk for many Americans. At the same time, highly publicized abuses of corporate power and financial meltdowns in former Wall Street gems like Enron and WorldCom together with more recent economic trouble in the U.S. housing market heighten uncertainties. Although these events have hastened personal experience of insecurity across all socioeconomic levels, even in the dotcom glory days many middle-class families rightly sensed a threatening undercurrent of change. Although unsettling, global economic restructuring begun in the 1970s fueled stratospheric growth in the 90s as corporations embraced “flexibility.” On an individual level, …

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Book Review 18 Make Room For Happiness By Steven Melemis, William C. Mcpeck Oct 2008

Book Review 18 Make Room For Happiness By Steven Melemis, William C. Mcpeck

William C. McPeck

This is my review of Make Room for Happiness: 12 Ways to Improve Your Life By Letting Go of Tension. Better Health, Self-Esteem and Relationships by Steven Melemis, published by Modern Therapies in 2008.

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Book Review 12 Happy For No Reason: 7 Steps To Being Happy From The Inside Out By Marci Shimoff, William C. Mcpeck Jun 2008

Book Review 12 Happy For No Reason: 7 Steps To Being Happy From The Inside Out By Marci Shimoff, William C. Mcpeck

William C. McPeck

This is my personal review of Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out by Marci Shimoff and published by Free Press in 2008.

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American Dreaming: Refugees From Corporate Work Seek The Good Life, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2007

American Dreaming: Refugees From Corporate Work Seek The Good Life, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

The economic restructuring and corporate downsizing that has come to define the contemporary working world has made contingent, part-time, and temporary work a part of the American social landscape. In this chapter, life-style migrants describe challenging taken for granted assumptions of the American Dream as a framework, a moral horizon that orients and promises future reward for present day loyalty, hard work and self-sacrifice. The decision of how to live one’s life is made of more than simply economic choices, they are also moral. The case of life-style migration shows how people may attempt to be true to an emerging …

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Grey Suit Or Brown Carhartt: Narrative Transition, Relocation And Reorientation In The Lives Of Corporate Refugees, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2005

Grey Suit Or Brown Carhartt: Narrative Transition, Relocation And Reorientation In The Lives Of Corporate Refugees, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

This article examines relocation stories of people who leave behind corporate work culture, relocate from metropolitan areas to small towns and rural places and attempt to reorient themselves to work and family obligations. Decisions to start over take place within the context of moral questions about what makes a life worth living and what does not through a process in which geography has bearing. For these migrants, a choice about where to live is also one about how to live. Choices of how to live one’s life are made of more than simple economics, they are also moral. The restructuring …

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The Prudent Village: Risk Pooling Institutions In Medieval English Agriculture, Gary Richardson May 2005

The Prudent Village: Risk Pooling Institutions In Medieval English Agriculture, Gary Richardson

Gary Richardson

The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failures by scattering his arable land throughout his village, Deirdre McCloskey argued, because alternative risksharing institutions did not exist. But, alternatives did exist, this essay concludes. Medieval English peasants formed two types of farmers’ cooperatives. Fraternities protected members from the perils of everyday life. Customary poor laws redistributed resources towards villagers beset by bad luck. In both institutions, the expectation of reciprocation motivated farmers with surpluses to aid neighbors with shortages.

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