Still Going: Recent Debates on the Goldschmidt Hypothesis 271areas and people? What type of agricultural system best serves social needs? These
questions cannot be answered by focusing on monolithic generalizations assumed
to exist in all times and places.
There are a number of directions in which future studies concerned with the
impacts of farming might proceed. Analysts have already carved out some of these
directions more deeply than others. The first is the continued elaboration of the
relationship between farming structure and community well-being. Case studies to
delineate the routes by which farming affects communities are still needed. A thor-
ough analysis of this issue is generally not possible through the use of conventional
county-level secondary data. For example, large-scale farming may impact commu-
nities through the labour force it utilizes, owners’ control of local politics, land and
water rights, and environmental regulations. Focusing on the spatial context within
which relationships occur and documenting theoretically the reasons for these are
another route. Analysts have stressed both environment and social structure as expla-
nations for regional and other geographic differences but further work remains.
A second direction would be to incorporate a focus on farm structure more fully
into the general issue of rural and global restructuring (Marsden et al, 1990). This
would involve the use of literature from industrial sociology, economic geography
and regional science dealing with economic structure and geographic space. This
literature covers topics such as the spatial division of labour or distribution of eco-
nomic activity, labour-market and locality research, and industrial location theory. It
could provide insights about the spatial patterns, dynamics, and impacts of farming
and how farming articulates with the non-farm economy. Farming would be treated
less as a unique case in community economic development, its analysis subject to the
principles that govern other industries in the formal and informal economy.
Another direction is to continue to connect changes in farming to broader
agricultural issues and to impacts beyond the locality, as others have argued (Fried-
land, 1982, 1989; Friedland et al, 1981). In the first instance, how farming is
affected by and utilized in globalization processes shaping agriculture is a timely
issue. While researchers have long pursued the environmental, food safety and
health-related impacts of farm production, much of the literature remains domi-
nated by non-social scientists.
Finally, the evolution of the Goldschmidt debate itself is still a largely unex-
plored topic, barely covered in this commentary. A more systematic review of the
Goldschmidt literature, particularly from a historical and sociology of knowledge
standpoint, would illuminate not only this particular genre of studies but rural
sociology as a discipline.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments of Ronald C. Wimberley and
anonymous reviewers.