Don Earl Albrecht (born December 8, 1952) is director of the Western Rural Development Center, before which he was a faculty member in the Department of Recreation, Parks and Tourism Sciences at Texas A&M University for 27 years [1] He received both his B.S. (forestry and outdoor recreation, 1976) and his M.S. (sociology, 1978) at Utah State University. In 1982 he received his Ph.D. in rural sociology at Iowa State University.
Albrecht has researched agricultural resource management, community development, rural poverty and family structure, demographic trends, education, and economic restructuring. [1] Although most of his work is specific to the United States, Albrecht has also done research in Eastern Europe and South America.
Albrecht has served as president of the Southern Rural Sociological Society (1997) and as vice-president of the Rural Sociological Society (2001–2002). For the latter society's peer-reviewed journal, Rural Sociology , he has served twice as an associate editor (1988–1991 and 1995–1999) and as book review editor (1994–1997).
In 2000, Albrecht received the Southern Rural Sociological Society's Excellence in Research Award. [2]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the discipline of sociology:
Rural sociology is a field of sociology traditionally associated with the study of social structure and conflict in rural areas. It is an active academic field in much of the world, originating in the United States in the 1910s with close ties to the national Department of Agriculture and land-grant university colleges of agriculture.
In general, a rural area or a countryside is a geographic area that is located outside towns and cities. Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements. Agricultural areas and areas with forestry typically are described as rural. Different countries have varying definitions of rural for statistical and administrative purposes.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Kingsley Davis was an internationally recognized American sociologist and demographer. He was identified by the American Philosophical Society as one of the most outstanding social scientists of the twentieth century, and was a Hoover Institution senior research fellow.
Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons. It is the differentiation preference of access of social goods in the society brought about by power, religion, kinship, prestige, race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and class. Social inequality usually implies the lack of equality of outcome, but may alternatively be conceptualized in terms of the lack of equality of access to opportunity. The social rights include labor market, the source of income, health care, and freedom of speech, education, political representation, and participation.
In China today, poverty refers mainly to the rural poor, decades of economic development has reduced urban extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, more than 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty; China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms,which still stands in 2022.Chinese definition of extreme poverty is more stringent than that of World Bank, and is defined as earning less than $2.30 a day at purchasing power parity (PPP),Since the start of far-reaching economic reforms in the late 1970s, growth has fuelled a substantial increase in per-capita income lifting people out of extreme poverty. China's per capita income has increased fivefold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita income also rose by the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000, moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries. Between 1990 and 2005, China's progress accounted for more than three-quarters of global poverty reduction and was largely responsible for the world reaching the UN millennium development target of dividing extreme poverty in half. This can be attributed to a combination of a rapidly expanding labour market, driven by a protracted period of economic growth, and a series of government transfers such as an urban subsidy, and the introduction of a rural pension. The World Bank Group said that the percentage of the population living below the international poverty line of $1.9 fell to 0.7 percent in 2015, and poverty line of $3.2 fell to 7% in 2015.At the end of 2018, the number of people living below China's national poverty line of ¥2,300 (CNY) per year was 16.6 million, equal to 1.7% of the population at the time.
Rural poverty refers to poverty in rural areas, including factors of rural society, rural economy, and political systems that give rise to the poverty found there. Rural areas, because of their spread-out populations, typically have less well maintained infrastructure and a harder time accessing markets, which tend to be concentrated in population centers. Rural communities also face disadvantages in terms of legal and social protections, with women and marginalized communities frequently having hard times accessing land, education and other support systems that help with economic development. Several policies have been tested in both developing and developed economies, including rural electrification and access to other technologies such as internet, gender parity, and improved access to credit and income.
The causes of poverty may vary with respect to nation, region, and in comparison with other countries at the global level. Yet, there is a commonality amongst these causes. Philosophical perspectives, and especially historical perspectives, including some factors at a micro and macro level can be considered in understanding these causes.
Martha Chen is an American academic, scholar and social worker, who is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and senior advisor of the global research-policy-action network WIEGO and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). Martha is a development practitioner and scholar who has worked with the working poor in India, South Asia, and around the world. Her areas of specialization are employment, poverty alleviation, informal economy, and gender. She lived in Bangladesh working with BRAC, one of the world's largest non-governmental organizations, and in India, as field representative of Oxfam America for India and Bangladesh for 15 years.
This bibliography of Sociology is a list of works, organized by subdiscipline, on the subject of sociology. Some of the works are selected from general anthologies of sociology, while other works are selected because they are notable enough to be mentioned in a general history of sociology or one of its subdisciplines.
The Global Social Change Research Project is a project devoted to bringing a clear understanding to the general public about social change. They have reports about social, political, economic, demographic and technological change throughout the world.
Poverty in Poland has been relatively stable in the past decades, affecting about 6.5% of the society. In the last decade there has been a lowering trend, as in general Polish society is becoming wealthier and the economy is enjoying one of the highest growth rates in Europe. There have been noticeable increases in poverty around the turns of the decades, offset by decreases in poverty in the years following those periods.
Norman Long is a British anthropologist. He conducted important fieldwork and made significant theoretical contributions through his application of insights from social anthropology in development studies. Anthropology was in the wake of decolonisation often seen as tainted by colonialism and not relevant in a development discourse. Long offered another perspective that can not be seen as bound by time and place. He advocated an actor-oriented perspective on development and thus formulated a critique on centralist biases in development theory.
Kenya is a lower-middle income economy. Although Kenya's economy is the largest and most developed in eastern and central Africa, 16.1% (2023/2024) of its population lives below the international poverty line. This severe poverty is mainly caused by economic inequality, government corruption and health problems. In turn, poverty also worsens these factors. Fortunately, Kenya's government has made many efforts to address the issue of poverty, and it has received significant help from international institutions as well. The incident rate of poverty has steadily decreased, as shown by a recent MPI index. However, the end to poverty in Kenya was due to some long-term efforts.
Refugio I. Rochin is an American professor emeritus in agricultural and resource economics and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, director emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and instructor at Pennsylvania State University World Campus. He is an expert on rural Latinas/os and Latina/o Studies.
Nancy A. Naples is an American sociologist, and currently Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she is also director of graduate studies. She has contributed significantly to the study of community activism, poverty in the United States, inequality in rural communities, and methodology in women's studies and feminism.
Landlessness is the quality or state of being without land, without access to land, or without having private ownership of land. Although overlapping considerably, landlessness is not a necessary condition of poverty. In modern capitalist societies, individuals may not necessarily privately own land yet still possess the capital to obtain an excess of what is necessary to sustain themselves, such as wealthy individuals who rent expensive high-rise apartments in major urban centers. As such, landlessness may not exist as an immediate threat to their survival or quality of life. This minority of landless individuals as sometimes been referred to as the "landless rich." However, for the majority of landless people, including the urban poor and those displaced into conditions of rural-to-urban migration, their condition of landlessness is also one of impoverishment, being without the capital to meet their basic necessities nor the land to grow their own food, keep animals, or sustain themselves. During times of economic prosperity in modern capitalist societies, the liabilities of landlessness may not be noticeable, especially to the wealthy, but during times of economic failure and rising unemployment, the liabilities of landlessness become more visible.
Cornelia Butler Flora is an American rural sociologist. She is mostly known for her work on community capitals framework (CCF), feminism in Latin America, social justice, social policy, women in development, rural development, sustainable agriculture, sustainable community, community development, and farmer welfare. She has worked globally across the United States, Latin America, and Africa. There are more than 247 publications to her name over the last five decades of her work. Her widely famous book Rural Communities: Legacy + Change has seen 43 editions published between 1992 and 2019 in three languages. She was appointed to the reputed National Agricultural Research, Education and Economics Advisory Board by the then U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 2004. She was also the president of the Rural Sociological Society in 1988–1989.
Gerardo Otero is a Mexican scholar, writer, and professor. Otero is currently a professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University, as well as an associated faculty member of the Labour Studies Program. He also served as the president of the Latin American Studies Association from 2021 to 2022. In Vancouver, where he currently resides, Otero is a founding member of the British Columbia Employment Standards Coalition, and a Research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.