ABSTRACT Military veteran entrepreneurship is central to federal transition policy, yet its institutional ecosystem was built for urban, growth‐oriented firms. Designed around formal capital pipelines, credentialing infrastructure, and institutionalized networks, the programmatic model was never built for places where relationships are the primary market infrastructure. What remains unspecified is its failure architecture—how it breaks down, for whom, and why. Drawing on interviews with 27 rural veteran entrepreneurs and 8 ecosystem actors across the Midwest, we apply ecological systems theory as a generative framework across ecological levels, from which we elaborate four mechanisms. Analysis reveals how institutional failures originate and compound across levels; when and why bonding capital substitutes for failed institutional bridging; how surname operates as ascriptive market trust that military mobility disrupts; and how unconditional disability compensation functions as an income floor that preserves entrepreneurial entry. While formal infrastructure shapes who can begin, relational and ascriptive resources increasingly determine who succeeds. A designed system can be redesigned once its failure points are specified—and that redesign requires treating bonding capital, ascriptive trust, and unconditional income floors as structural features of rural veteran entrepreneurship rather than individual workarounds.
ABSTRACT Sociologists have long used a deficit view in their work. However, some sociologists have recently turned to positive emotions, such as joy and hope, to provide a more complete view of marginalized and other populations. Largely, rural sociologists have not made the turn toward positive emotions. Rural places in the Western United States have been of interest to sociologists due to historical and contemporary social, economic, and demographic change. By focusing on these changes, sociologists have often geared their research toward how rural places are struggling and the conflict among residents. I suggest that there is a more complete view of rural places that includes hope. Using data from semi‐structured interviews, a drop‐off/pickup survey, and 2 years spent living in Beaverhead County, Montana, I found that residents of Beaverhead County appear to have both collective and individual hope for the future. My research indicates that central to this hope is a shared vision for the community's future and collective engagement in creating a place that residents want to live. Considering this, I suggest that researchers should follow the work of positive psychologists and environmental sociologists by integrating hope as a lens to view and understand rural places in their research.
This paper reports on an ongoing study of energy services in rural, northern U.S. communities. Anchored in case studies across three northern states, the research aims to understand how residents experience energy service access. These case studies were selected for their shared histories of resource extraction and inclusion of Tribal Nations within each community. Using an online survey, the study finds that residents of these rural northern communities report facing high energy burdens, with 26% of households reporting that they spend over 10% of their income on energy costs. Energy burden varies across the three case study communities in correlation with energy costs. Heating remains predominantly dependent on fossil fuels, with only 4.6% of households utilizing heat pumps, which offer a more energy-efficient method of heat production using electricity. Cooling demand is currently being met by inefficient systems, including central and window air conditioners. Low-income households bear a disproportionate share of these challenges, exacerbated by poor housing insulation and reports of more frequent power outages. Acknowledging the distinct histories and needs of rural northern communities with post-extractive legacies represents a form of recognition justice and requires future energy decisions to be responsive to their unique needs and vulnerabilities.
Over the past two decades as global alarm over disruptive climate change has grown, coalitions of high-ranking government officials and prominent activists have launched campaigns to protect and restore greenhouse gas absorbing rain forests. The initial results from these campaigns have varied dramatically across racial and ethnic landholding groups. A case study of environmental initiatives in the Ecuadorian Amazon, presented here, begins to explain these patterns in the adoption of natural climate solutions. Indigenous peoples, practicing a kind of defensive environmentalism, have been effective at protecting the old growth tropical rain forests that they inhabit. Their ability to mobilize and defend forests stems from earlier conflicts with settler colonists in which indigenous groups defended their access to forests from incursions by settlers. When settlers occupied the land, they initially destroyed forests, only to later foster the regrowth of trees in actively managed pastures.
This paper argues that social and cultural capital are not only accumulations of past ties, credentials, and dispositions but also temporally oriented resources aligned with anticipated futures. Although capital is theorized as generative and field-dependent, empirical measures typically operationalize it retrospectively, tracking established networks and recognized identities rather than actors' positioning amid emerging social, economic, and ecological change. I introduce the concept of anticipatory capital to capture these temporal alignments, distinguishing between capital that reinforces inherited pathways and capital that repositions actors toward evolving fields. Integrating this perspective clarifies why individuals, households, and communities with comparable capital stocks experience divergent outcomes during periods of rapid transition. By making temporal alignment explicit, anticipatory capital clarifies how social and cultural assets fluctuate in value as fields evolve, sharpening analyses of inequality, resilience, and vulnerability and offering a framework for assessing how communities prepare for-or resist-structural transformation.
The persistence of gendered divisions of household labor has been well documented, but comparatively little attention has been given to how these divisions vary between urban and rural contexts. Rural households are embedded in distinct social, economic, and cultural settings that may reinforce or reshape domestic arrangements. Using nationally representative data from the Canadian General Social Survey, this study examines gender differences in time spent on household chores across urban and rural areas. We distinguish between routine tasks, such as cooking and cleaning, and nonroutine tasks, such as household repairs and yard work. Findings indicate that women continue to perform substantially more unpaid labor than men regardless of place of residence. However, the gender gap is larger in rural contexts, driven by both rural men's lower engagement in routine chores and rural women's higher total time in domestic work compared to their urban counterparts. These results suggest that rural residence amplifies traditional gendered patterns of labor. By situating unpaid household labor within an urban-rural framework, this study highlights how place remains a key axis of inequality in family life and underscores the ways that geographic context intersects with gender to structure everyday practices within households.
This study examines structural housing vacancy as an underrecognized dimension of rural and nonmetropolitan inequality in the United States. Rural areas experiencing structural vacancy face economic strain, weakened housing markets, fiscal stress, and cycles of disinvestment and population loss. Existing research emphasizes metropolitan contexts and absolute vacancy counts, obscuring rural and nonmetropolitan patterns that become visible when vacancy is measured as a percentage of total housing units and when seasonal housing is analytically separated. Using county-level data from the 2015-2019 American Community Survey, this study examines the correlates of structural housing vacancy-defined as vacant housing units excluding those used for seasonal, recreational, or occasional purposes. Results indicate that structural vacancy is strongly associated with economic disadvantage, weaker housing markets, rural remoteness, and regional context. In contrast, seasonal vacancy reflects amenity-driven dynamics tied to aging populations, retirement migration, and second-home ownership. Path analyses further demonstrate substantial subregional heterogeneity in the mechanisms producing seasonal and structural vacancy. These findings demonstrate that structural vacancy is a spatial manifestation of uneven development and population change across rural America, while highlighting the importance of distinguishing vacancy regimes and advancing a more spatially grounded understanding of housing inequality in the United States.
Sea-level rise (SLR) has the potential to profoundly impact coastal ecosystems and human communities. SLR will cause marshes to erode on their seaward edge, but marsh migration onto uplands may allow for their persistence and continued provision of ecosystem services. Low elevation agricultural land may be well-suited for marsh migration; however, SLR and associated marsh migration on agricultural land could negatively impact farmers and landowners, underscoring the value of exploring both social and ecological dimensions of marsh migration. We conducted semi-structured interviews (n = 12) with coastal farmers and agricultural landowners on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, USA to understand their experiences with and perceptions of impacts of marsh migration on their agricultural lands and in their community. While interviewees acknowledged some benefits of marsh migration, the preservation of farmland was preferred over allowing marsh migration. Participants also shared their views on some of the social consequences of SLR and marsh migration such as impacts to their livelihoods, damage to infrastructure in their communities, and the impact of regulatory boundaries related to wetlands. However, most saw these as distant issues. We outline additional socio-cultural factors interviewees noted, such as intergenerational ties to the community and desires to see open space conserved, that could influence efforts to promote marsh migration. In revealing current challenges and opportunities facing coastal farmers and agricultural landowners due to SLR, these findings can inform coastal adaptation planning efforts that simultaneously consider ecological and social impacts of marsh migration.
Although numerous farmer innovation strategies have been proposed to address the challenges in rural areas, there remains limited knowledge about how to effectively facilitate their adoption. This study utilizes Q-methodology to identify the key factors influencing the adoption of a participatory breeding strategy for native maize in the central region of Veracruz, Mexico. The methodology was applied with 16 farmers, revealing three distinct perspectives regarding the most viable ways to promote this strategy: (1) fostering government intervention to provide resources and technical support, (2) ensuring the strategy results in increased economic benefits for families, and (3) prioritizing collective work and achieving prompt, tangible outcomes. The study highlights the importance of understanding the diversity of expectations among farmers regarding agricultural innovation strategies promoted by research groups, governmental institutions, and NGOs. Far from being homogenous, these expectations reflect complex and, at times, conflicting perspectives, underscoring the need for tailored approaches that consider local priorities and dynamics.
This paper examines how "community readiness" operates within just transition governance, arguing that readiness frameworks-though intended to support locally grounded, participatory change-can also unevenly shape recognition, participation, and repair. In rural transition contexts, readiness is often treated as evidence of legitimacy and fairness through cohesion, consensus, and institutional alignment-even as these qualities may obscure internal inequalities and foreclose contested futures. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, recognition justice, and scholarship on anticipatory governance, the paper reconceptualizes readiness not as a neutral measure of capacity but as a governing grammar that organizes who counts as the community, how disagreement is interpreted, and which futures are rendered actionable. Empirically, the paper analyzes Colorado's effort to decarbonize its electricity system by 2040, focusing on the institutional architecture created to manage coal plant closures and support coal-dependent regions. Based on an iterative analysis of a wide set of documents, the study identifies four recurring political grammars-legibility, harmony, anticipation, and state redress without redistribution-that structure just transition governance across institutional sites. Together, these grammars help explain how transition efforts can be substantively active and procedurally inclusive while remaining constrained in their capacity to address deeper questions of power, belonging, and rural political-economic change. The paper concludes by advancing "just readiness" as an analytic orientation attentive to contestation, evolving community boundaries, and the politics of anticipation in rural sustainability transitions.
Existing research demonstrates strong connections between community, identity, place, and narrative. Using a case study focused on the Bears Ears National Monument in San Juan County, Utah, USA, this paper utilizes the framework of "community as story" to explore how narratives both draw on and shape local identity. Through an exploratory content analysis of publicly available media, we examine how residents responded to changes in their communities. Locals expressed their connection to the land through personal and collective narratives, often invoking family history, stewardship, and memories tied to place. Our findings illustrate that residents use storytelling not only to affirm their individual and collective identities but also to resist perceived threats to their community. By demonstrating how place-based narratives influence community responses to change, this study advances our understanding of the relational dimensions of community and underscores the importance of local voices in discussions on land use and policy.
To what extent does community context shape individuals' experience of community? This study replicates and extends Flaherty and Brown's multilevel application of Kasarda and Janowitz' systemic model using four separate multilevel datasets and multiple measures of community experience. The results reaffirm Flaherty and Brown's findings and support the systemic model by showing that community attachment varies little across communities and is primarily explained by individual-level variables. In contrast, psychological sense of community appears to vary more substantially between communities and may provide a more nuanced and effective way to assess community experience. The authors urge community sociologists to reflect on the original rationale for using community attachment and to consider the theoretical implications of its limited variance between communities-despite its longstanding use as a key community-level social indicator.
White working-class men living in rural areas are affected by increased rates of distress thought to lead to risk-taking behaviors. This study advances understanding of risk-taking-related distress by examining how men interpret their experiences and how these meaning-making processes connect to shifting social-structural conditions in rural working-class life. Drawing on 14 interviews with men affected by risk-taking-related distress, I find that men's descriptions largely focus on interpersonal relationships and often center on the end of romantic relationships with women, which they describe as unfair or undeserved. When respondents describe internal states, they report feeling depressed and having nothing and display feelings of resentment. Findings suggest that this group's declining social position has led to a mismatch between expectations and resources necessary for achieving those expectations. A sense of failing to meet directives of their working-class masculine identities-especially maintaining control in heterosexual romantic relationships-may lead men to manage distress by engaging in risk-taking behavior. Findings extend understanding of how macro-social conditions in areas with high rates of risk-taking-related mortality translate into distress through men's cultural expectations and identity.
As the decarbonization-driven energy transition accelerates, land-intensive renewable energy technologies, and large-scale solar facilities (LSS) in particular, increasingly compete for rural land. In the Northeast United States, LSS development largely depends on private landowners' decisions to lease land for LSS development. Little research has documented the characteristics of landowners who either agree or refuse to contract with LSS developers nor how they are likely to change their future land management, especially agricultural practices. Drawing on a survey of 1499 rural landowners (n = 584 responses) conducted in three counties of New York State, currently ranked 8th nationally in solar energy production, but with even more ambitious solar production goals, this study explores landowner beliefs, decision-making, and intended land management behavior concerning LSS development. Nearly half of respondents had been approached to lease land for LSS development. Farmland owners-compared to landowners who do not own land that is agricultural (henceforth "non-farmland owners") were approached to lease more frequently but were less likely to lease if approached. More negative beliefs about LSS, stronger levels of opposition to LSS, and concerns about the solar development company are associated with observed lower rates of leasing among farmland owners. Farmers with LSS leases are three times more likely to indicate that they intend to use solar revenues to continue farming rather than as an agricultural exit strategy. Nearly half do not intend to change their agricultural practices. Based on these results we suggest that-at least in this context-concerns about farmland loss due to LSS may be overstated.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is the latest in a series of initiatives aimed at modernizing small-scale farming to address food insecurity and poverty, yet AGRA has fallen short of its goals. This study explores whether these shortcomings might stem from flawed assumptions in AGRA's theory of change-assumptions long embedded in top-down agricultural modernization efforts. We situate AGRA within broader debates on the agrarian question, especially the Chayanov-Lenin debate, and draw historical parallels with United States agricultural industrialization, the Green Revolution, and Soviet collectivization, as well as Tanzania's villagization program. Tanzania is an instructive case, having undergone both collectivist and market-based modernization. Using Chayanov's theory of peasant household decision-making, we analyze panel survey data from the Tanzania National Panel Survey (TNPS), part of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) program, to examine how household demographic factors relate to labor and land use decisions. Our findings show that household composition is significantly associated with agricultural labor allocation choices and land use. We also address Chayanov's gender blind spot, finding that men and women plot managers and men- and women-headed households often pursue different labor allocation and land use strategies. These results suggest that AGRA's model may make questionable assumptions about the decision-making of small-scale farmers. We conclude by considering the implications of this modernization logic and argue that a pragmatic approach to agricultural development, one rooted in the actual priorities and preferences of small-scale farmers, offers an alternative.
The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the first instrument specifically designed to measure public perceptions of rural America. The researcher-developed instrument was comprised of 22 items. An exploratory factor analysis and a confirmatory factor analysis were conducted in two different samples: a group of undergraduate students and a national sample. A four-factor model of the scale was confirmed, including community strengths and safety, economic and educational challenges, health and addiction issues, and social discrimination and cultural tensions. The scale is appropriate for measuring perceptions of rural Americans reliably and accurately. A better understanding of the perceptions of rural America will help educators and communicators identify and promote solutions for the issues and challenges facing those communities.
