Some (relatively) new conceptual ‘frames’ supplementing the study of human capital in rural sociology

Abstract

The article continues the authors’ thoughts about the necessary conceptual frameworks that would help rural sociology provide more reliable insights and data in the study of such a relatively new (in the conceptual-analytical perspective) social phenomenon as rural human capital. In the previous article, we presented a brief overview of such half-forgotten but still relevant theoretical foundations of rural sociology as agricultural economics, theories of peasant agrarianism, and theory of rural-urban continuum, which to a greater or lesser extent can be applied in the analysis of rural development and rural social and human capital. In this article, we provide a brief overview of some more recent agrarian ideas that seem to have sufficient but questionable heuristic potential for rural sociology. First, the idea and repeatedly tested projects of the Green Revolution, or the Third Agricultural Revolution, which implied technology transfer initiatives to greatly increase crop yields, opposed the concept of “Red Revolution” (comprehensive agrotechnological transformations instead of radical political ones), despite some skeptical assessments, in the last decades of the 20th century contributed to the reduction in global hunger, and, especially in its Soviet interpretations, seemed to be consonant with the more recent intellectual direction - development studies. Second, Peasant Studies defending the position that the very question about the need for a special theory of the peasantry and peasant societies is untenable, and presenting an attempt to develop a middlerange theory within historical sociology, which is based on the four most important characteristics of the peasantry in the past and present: family economy, work on land in interaction with nature, local culture of self-organization (rural community), and marginal role in relation to the state. Today’s disputes about the peasantry in the contemporary world are complemented by two macroconcepts - theory of international food regimes and theory of global rural development. Thus, we still miss unambiguous theoretical generalizations regarding rural development due to the extreme diversity of both rural areas (and their social/human capital) and interpretations/definitions of rural/agricultural development (for instance, deagrarianization and extractivism or rural-urban glocalization and optimistic “unorthodox” social-ecological model).