Rural areas have been hit hard by economic restructuring. Traditionally male jobs with good pay and benefits (such as in manufacturing) have declined dramatically, only to be replaced with low-paying service-oriented jobs&—jobs that do not offer benefits or wages sufficient to raise a family. Concurrently, rural areas have experienced changes in family life, namely an increase in women&’s labor force participation, a decline in married-couple families, and a rise in cohabitation and single-parent families. How have rural families coped with these social and economic changes? Economic Restructuring and Family Well-Being in Rural America documents the intertwined changes in employment and family and explores the outcomes for family well-being in rural America. Here a multidisciplinary group of scholars examines the impacts of economic restructuring on rural Americans and provides policy recommendations for addressing the challenges they face. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Cynthia D. Anderson, Guangqing Chi, Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Katherine Jewsbury Conger, Nicole D. Forry, Deborah Roempke Graefe, Steven Michael Grice, Andrew Hahn, Debra Henderson, Eric B. Jensen, Leif Jensen, Marlene Lee, Daniel T. Lichter, Elaine McCrate, Diane K. McLaughlin, Margaret K. Nelson, Domenico Parisi, Liliokanaio Peaslee, Jed Pressgrove, Jennifer Sherman, Anastasia Snyder, Susan K. Walker, and Chih-Yuan Weng.

This volume provides readers with recent sociological approaches to family understanding, theorising and practices within the context of continuities and change, both across generations and during individual life courses. The contributors uniquely investigate the friction between persisting family needs and changing circumstances, between holding on to traditional family norms and adapting to fast-changing demands. Authors from nine countries develop and apply innovative theoretical and methodological approaches for a more differentiated description of European family lives at the beginning of the 21st century, and show that family sociology has achieved significant commonalities across national borders in Europe, thus helping our understanding of complex family realities. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in family and intimate life, family sociology and policy, sociology and gender studies.

Young men choosing a traditional working career 189 Young women making modern choices 191 The struggles of young men versus the success of young women 192 CONCLUSIONS Changing economies, changing households 195 Jane Wheelock and Age Mariussen Summing up 195 Institutional comparisons: empirical analysis 197 Theoretical implications 201 Policy implications 204 Bibliography 207 Index 231 ix ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1. 1 Institutional change as a theme in economics and sociology 15 1. 2 The household in the total economy 28 2. 1 The household in the production, reproduction and consumption cloverleaf 39 10. 1 Characteristics of the two extreme groups of farmers, 'sceptics' and 'radicals' 155 11. 1 Flexibility in the family economic unit 161 Tables ILl Changing employment structure in Wearside and Mo i Rana, selected years 67 11. 2 Employment change comparisons, Wearside!Great Britain and Mo i Rana/Norway, selected years 68 11. 3 Major industrial sectors, Wearside and Mo i Rana, selected years 69 11. 4 Employment in Wearside and Mo i Rana: gender and part-time! full-time breakdown, selected years 70 The degree of change in the organisation of household work 7. 1 116 Economic status categories and family succession 10. 1 150 12. 1 Economic position of young adults (16-29) in Newcastle 176 12.

This book analyzes the dramatic social impacts of global economic restructuring in the US textile industry and the consequences for Southern textile mill communities. With the expansion of markets in the global economy, government policies such as NAFTA and GATT are greatly affecting the domestic production of textiles. Increased global competitiveness has led to technological modernization, plant shutdowns, and downward pressure on wages. Many family-owned companies are merging into conglomerates, some of which are international. Concurrently, the structure of power and domination in Southern textile communities is changing. Paternalistic control, typically portrayed as a form of traditional authority and benevolent protection of workers, is no longer dominant. With the decreased need for skilled labor, textile company owners are not obligated to provide mill villages with housing electricity, and water. Formerly protected communities are now players on an international scale, with workers competing for jobs on a global level. New forms of class exploitation, racism, and sexism provide a contested terrain for mill employees. As the industry restructures, workers and their households are faced with new challenges. To understand these social impacts, I examine globalization, restructuring, and spatialization as processes embedded in multiple layers of reality. The multi-level analysis focuses on the Southern textile industry, a leading firm, its surrounding labor market area, and members of the community. Historical, statistical and qualitative interviewing methods yield data that demonstrate redefined labor markets, reconstituted race relations, and household adaptations. Changes in firm and industry impact shop-floor labor processes, including increased production pace, new management strategies and technological adjustments. As embedded layers of social relations, the multi-level outcomes are both negative and positive, creating new winners and losers in Southern communities.

In a 2004 study by the Annie E. Casey, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations it was reported that a large number of American families are currently faring poorly in their struggle to provide for themselves. Low-income and poor families were found to contain one-third of all of the children in American working families. Low-wage jobs without benefits mean that families at or below the poverty line live a precarious existence. This four-volume set is designed to reveal, explicate, analyze, and assess the effects of an inadequate income on children. Each volume contains original essays written by an interdisciplinary roster of contributors. The first volume, Children and the State addresses policy and legislation that affect low-income families. One issue that is considered in this volume is the lack of a national housing policy in the United States. The second volume, Health and Medical Issues includes discussions on the status of Medicaid, the lack of mental health services available for low-income families, and the difficult-to-access healthcare for the rural poor. Volume three, Families and Children explores the effects of welfare reform, especially the issue of childcare and the increased work expectations of parents. Other compelling topics in this volume include low-income families and the Family and Medical Leave Act, poor children and the internet, and the increase in economic insecurity among low-income families who increasingly live on credit. In the final volume, The Promise of Education, universal pre-kindergarten, Head Start, and the education of immigrant children are all explored.

This groundbreaking book examines the links between migration and the United States' ongoing economic and demographic revolution. Utilizing an explicitly geographic perspective, the contributors highlight the crucial role played by scale and spatial context in both immigration and internal migration.

Agriculture remains the main source of employment and livelihood for the large rural population of many transition countries, especially among the former Soviet republics. Accordingly, the World Bank continuously monitors the progress of land reform and farm restructuring in the region because of the potential impact of these processes on rural development and poverty alleviation in rural areas. The present study on Belarus is the latest addition to a long and growing series of World Bank publications on land reform and farm restructuring in the former socialist countries of Europe and Central Asia. The unique features of all these publications is their reliance on first-hand empirical information collected through extensive farm surveys of various rural constituencies. Analysis of survey findings enables the World Bank to base its policy dialogue with governments in the region on solid empirical facts, making the Bank's recommendations more credible and relevant. The survey findings in this volume will provide a platform for useful policy discussions with this country's government and supply international donors that are active there with essential information to design their strategic programs.

China is home to a fifth of the worlds inhabitants. For the last several decades, this huge population has been in flux: fertility has fallen sharply, mortality has declined, and massive rural-to-urban migration is taking place. The state has played a direct role in these changes, seeing population control as an important part of its intention to modernize the country. In this insightful new work, Nancy E. Riley argues that Chinas population policies and outcomes are not simply imposed by the state onto an unresponsive citizenry, but have arisen from the social organization of China over the past sixty years. Riley demonstrates how Chinas population and population policy are intertwined and interact with other social and economic features. Riley also examines the unintended consequences of state directives, including the extraordinary number of missing girls, the rapid aging of the population, and an increase in inequality, particularly between rural and urban residents. Ultimately, Chinas demographic story has to be understood as a complex, multi-pieced phenomenon. This book will be essential reading for researchers and students of China and social demography, as well as non-specialists interested in the changing nature of Chinas population.