The Political Economy of Class Structure in U.S. Agriculture: A Theoretical Outline

Social class and social stratification are two frequently used concepts in rural sociology, yet there has been a surprisingly small amount of attention paid to the class structure of agriculture as a phenomenon in its own right. Put another way, although American rural sociologists can hardly avoid social class as an idea, direct confrontation with the reality of agricultural class relations has been rare. Thus, a most well known and extensively cited paper in this area, Arthur Stinchcombe’s (1961 ), “Agricultural Enterprise and Rural Class Relations,” was written by a non-rural sociologist.