Linda Lobao

The Ohio State University | OSU · Department of Sociology

Inequality is a pivotal concern for social scientists, manifest within and across communities globally. Geoffrey DeVerteuil provides a provocative discussion about the contours of inequality in the city and offers a heuristic framework aimed at its understanding. I focus on three aspects of DeVerteuil's arguments: the importance of reconsidering ra...

Urban theorists offer varying explanations for why communities use austerity policies that limit or cut government. We develop a synthesis of political-economic and institutional explanations. Using this new synthetic approach, we analyze the characteristics of communities that promote the use of cutback policies and question whether relationships...

From the early 19th century, Appalachia was the primary U.S. coal producer, but over the course of the last century, its coal industry evolved and ultimately faded from market dominance. This transition took a very long time, and spanned periods of boom and bust, new mine openings and mine closures, as well as wide-ranging economic development unre...

Sociologists have long studied poverty across localities. Yet, little research focuses on local governments and the social services they directly provide to those in-need. Researchers concerned with the US welfare state note that localized administration of social programs creates geographic variability in provisioning and potential for status-base...

Sociologists have long recognized uneven development within nations and differential patterns of poverty and prosperity across places. In analyzing why some places fare better than others, researchers largely focus on market forces. Few studies have considered the role of the local state. Yet in many countries today local governments have gained re...

This study takes a new look at place development, analyzing the power of local business actors as compared to civic society and government in localities across the United States. We address the contested question of who controls place-making with a focus on growth control land-use policies. Theoretically, we draw from sociology’s growth machine fra...

The growth machine (GM) perspective has long guided urban research. Our study provides a new extension of this perspective, focusing on local business actors’ influence on communities across the United States. We question whether GM‐oriented business actors remain widely associated with contemporary local economic development policies, and further,...

This article explores the ‘shrinking state’, the potential erosion of the state from its customary intervention in regulating economic growth and promoting redistribution and the overall weakening of the state as an institution in local/regional affairs. State retreat may be seen in the withdrawal of finance, services and staff as well as the failu...

The rural‐urban political divide has sparked media and social science concern. Yet national studies of rural and urban voters have largely failed to draw from the distinct conceptual literatures produced by rural sociologists. We take a new look at individuals’ voting choices, building from two rural sociological literatures, research on spatial in...

Local governments face increased pressure to collaborate with one another to provide services aimed at increasing economic development. While scholars and practitioners share interest in intergovernmental collaboration, past studies have rarely questioned the role of civil society. Based on the social capital literature, a robust local civil societ...

The impacts of employment in the coal industry remain controversial. Few studies have investigated these impacts over the decade of the great recession and in light of the nation's changing energy economy. We bring together two long-standing rural sociological traditions to address debates framed at the national level and for Appalachian communitie...

Spatial scale is an implicit but often unacknowledged organizing framework for sociological inquiry on development. The study of social change-including the causes and consequences of development-can be addressed at a variety of territorial resolutions. However, as is the case with sociological subfields, certain scales become privileged for theore...

As localities increasingly confront challenging fiscal circumstances, how are they prioritizing the interests of business vis-a`-vis citizens’? While some scholars suggest an inverse relationship between localities’ developmental policies and social services provision, a zero-sum situation, others question this view. The second group of scholars su...

Coal mining has a long legacy of providing needed jobs in isolated communities but it is also associated with places that suffer from high poverty and weaker long-term economic growth. Yet, the industry has greatly changed in recent decades. Regulations, first on air quality, have altered the geography of coal mining, pushing it west from Appalachi...

Sociologists have long studied subnational development across the United States focusing on state and market forces that contribute to spatial inequality and uneven development. Subnational research is central to development sociology's concern with the present neoliberal stage of capitalism and to numerous theoretical, substantive, and policy issu...

Privatization, business attraction incentives, and limited social service provision are market-oriented policies that broadly concern social scientists. These policies are conventionally assumed to be widely implemented across the United States, a world model of neoliberal development. This study takes a new look at these policies, providing a firs...

The city is a significant level of geography at which to examine the economic, political and social implications of austerity. We consider how the financial crisis originated in the urban and became part of a broader state crisis with consequences for cities. We then explore political implications that include the undermining of democratic processe...

Ownership is central to how the economic system operates. Yet the topic is widely neglected. This is particularly surprising given the 2007–2008 credit crunch, which created in 2009 the first global recession since the 1930s. Ownership played a crucial role, from the drive for ‘shareholder value’, through to the mortgages for home ownership used to...

AbstractU.S. states and localities often engage in economic development policies using incentives and abatements for specific firms or industries. Yet, there is very little empirical evidence suggesting that such policies are successful. Why, then, do governments engage in these policies? In order to answer this question, we employ a model that con...

Many researchers advocate active local government responses to poverty and other economic disparities. In doing so, they raise a generally unexplored question: can local governments themselves influence poverty net of other determinants? This study extends past research in two ways by (1) analyzing the poverty-reducing role of county governments an...

The Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (CJRES) 2012 contain articles which point to several key issues about theorizing and measuring well-being as a construct. Alkire provides a useful discussion of these efforts to characterize the good life. They range from upstream philosophical views of universal or irreducible...

There is a large body of literature arguing that the area's dependence on coal mining has contributed to its deep poverty through: weaker local governance, entrepreneurship and educational attainment; environmental degradation; poor health outcomes; and limitations on other economic opportunities. There are multiple ways MTM may influence poverty r...

This study examines the geography of local austerity policies across the USA. We contrast two perspectives, the political economy framework that sees a general shift towards the use of limited government austerity policies across regions and over time and newer state-rescaling literature that challenges this view. Analyses are based on data collect...

A bstract The welfare of farm animals has become a continuing source of controversy as states seek greater regulation over the livestock industry. However, empirical studies addressing the determinants of public concern for farm‐animal welfare are limited. Religion and politics, two institutional bases of attitudes, are rarely explored. Nor have so...

Objectives. It is widely believed that prison construction offers significant economic benefits to local areas. We review the popular and scholarly literature and provide a quantitative analysis of claims. Methods. We analyze data on all existing and new prisons in the United States since 1960 to assess the impact of these prisons on the pace of pu...

Abstract This study examines the contentions of two recent perspectives on rural economic organization and their implications for poverty. Building from (1) agrarian political economy and (2) the rural restructuring literatures, we present a comparative regional analysis of how farming patterns and other aspects of economic organization differentia...

Abstract The effects of the economy on political attitudes is a longstanding sociological issue that is receiving renewed attention in the face of recent U.S. economic downturns. While the impacts of the farm crisis on financial and household well-being of farm operators have been addressed by a number of studies, few have explored its political ou...

Abstract Rural sociology is intrinsically concerned with the spatial dimensions of social life. However, this underlying research tradition, particularly the use of space as a research strategy, has been insufficiently addressed and its contributions to general sociology are little recognized. I outline how concern with space, uneven development, a...

Social scientists have long been concerned with power and politics and with the geographic settings in which social life occurs. But these two concerns have evolved rather separately. In sociology, economics, and political science deductive traditions of the twentieth century stressed the importance of producing generalizations that were context in...

Ce numero est consacre a l'identification de caracteres spatiaux des inegalites et de la diversite, temoignant ainsi de l'emergence de nouvelles orientations dans la recherche sur la stratification. Un des principaux clivages quant a la repartition des disparites se trouvant entre les espaces metropolitains et les espaces ruraux, la sociologie rura...

Abstract  Sociologists have produced large, well-known literatures on inequality across geographic territory at two ends of the spatial scale continuum, within the city and across nation-states. In this paper, I discuss a different scale of focus, subnational stratification processes across middle-range spatial units, those between the city and nat...

Abstract There is limited recent research on the strategies that rural local governments are employing in the face of changing intergovernmental relationships, especially in relation to local economic development. This paper draws on data from a survey of local governments in the Ohio River Valley Region that includes a mix of localities on the urb...

Abstract  While sociologists and the public at large are increasingly interested in the life conditions of animals, conceptual and empirical development of the topic is limited. This paper seeks to further develop the sociological research on attitudes toward animal well-being. We build on insights from contemporary stratification theory to explain...

Social scientists have given substantial attention to poverty across U.S. localities. However, most work views localities through the lens of population aggregates, not as units of government. Few poverty researchers question whether governments of poorer localities have the capacity to engage in economic development and service activities that mig...

Over the past 100 years, modern Western states have undergone two historic transformations. The first occurred between the 1920s and the 1940s, when the liberal, non-interventionist form that had dominated the 19th and earlier centuries gave way to the Keynesian welfare interventionist (or Fordist) form. From its origins in the 1930s (in the UK, th...

A framework based on regulation theory and regimes of accumulation is developed to account for the transitions of Midwestern agriculture from the Great Depression to the late 1980s. This perspective underscores the importance of the integration of agriculture into wider circuits of production and consumption, of external economic processes such as...

We employ a multi-method approach to more fully explore determinants of greater than expected rural county-level increases and decreases in the proportion of working poor in four states. An econometric model by Anderson, Goe, and Weng (2007) using 1990 and 2000 Census data in the North Central region of the U.S. supplies the error terms to identify...

Social scientists have a long history of concern with the effects of industrialized farming on communities. Recently, the topic has taken on new importance as corporate farming laws in a number of states are challenged by agribusiness interests. Defense of these laws often requires evidence from social science research that industrialized farming p...

Geauga county, OHIO, reflects a portrait of national affluence, with a median household income of over $52,000 per year and a poverty rate of an even 5 percent. Several hours due south, residents of Meigs County realize a median household income half that of Geauga's population and confront a poverty rate four times as high. These statistics are ev...

Despite widespread interest in spatializing sociology, consideration of space in research on stratification remains limited. Well-recognized, coherent literatures on stratification are found mainly at two opposite spatial scales, the city and the cross-national level. A large urban literature explores inequalities of poverty, racial segregation, cr...

Sociologists study inequality in a variety of forms and venues. For much of the last century, however, exploration of inequality in the United States proceeded largely without explicit attention to geographic space. But the discipline has entered a new era. A broad movement to spatialize sociology beyond the legacy of past traditions has arisen. Ne...

Sociologists have too often discounted the role of space in inequality. This book showcases a recent generation of inquiry that attends to poverty, prosperity, and power across a range of territories and their populations within the United States, addressing spatial inequality as a thematically distinct body of work that spans sociological research...

The study of stratification is a foremost concern of sociologists. Historical engagement with this topic creates a distinct conceptual lens on poverty and inequality and a voluminous body of empirical work that set sociology apart from economics and to some degree, geography. At the same time, the discipline is limited in developing a spatial under...

Analysts have debated the extent to which recent economic changes represent a continuation of earlier patterns or a fundamental shift to a new industrial order. We trace and extend the spatial implications of this debate for a mature industrial region, the Ohio River Valley, part of the American Manufacturing Belt, for the 1980-90 period. The paper...

During the past few decades, local governments have extended the scope of their activities in response to changing economic and political conditions. By and large, research on local governments neglects counties, now the fastest growing general-purpose governments. This article examines counties’roles in economic development and public service acti...

Research on economic restructuring generally emphasizes change, rather than continuity, in the socioeconomic landscape. That expectation is addressed here by comparing 1970 and 1990 in terms of the gender division of labor for U.S. counties. These years represent poles of the Fordist/post-Fordist transition, an era of cataclysmic change. A subset o...

As America's small farmers dwindle to a precious few, they remain national icons with broad public support and impressive political clout. This paradox highlights the economic, political, and symbolic power of farming in the United States, all of which may not suffice to save family farms.

Objectives. Despite the interest that social scientists have displayed in the rising rate of incarceration, little attention has been devoted to understanding its consequences for local areas. This is an important omission because prison construction has become a component of state and local economic development schemes. Indeed, there is a widespre...

This study examines state provisioning of social welfare and employment and its consequences for local economic well-being. Do a larger public sector and more generous social welfare transfers help or harm local populations? To address this question, we derive hypotheses from two competing social policy schools, neoliberal and radical political eco...

▪ Abstract One of the most profound changes in the United States in the past century is the national abandonment of farming as a livelihood strategy. This change is evident both in the exodus of Americans from farming and in the conditions faced by the farmers remaining, most of whom are marginal producers in an increasingly concentrated industry....

Macro-level economic decline is usually assumed to affect the mental health of individuals but the process by which this occurs and factors that moderate are still not well understood. This study builds from three bodies of literature to address how economic hardship, religion and psychosocial variables affect mental health outcomes in the context...

Although sociologists have given increased attention to political responses of populations experiencing economic restructuring, existing research remains conceptually limited. Building upon resource mobilization theory and longstanding structural approaches, we extend the conceptual discourse of mobilization by considering alternative bases of acti...

County governments are the fastest growing level of local government in the United States. Based on a recent survey of counties in 45 states, this paper analyzes the size of county governments relative to other local governments, the scope of county government services, and fiscal stress faced by county governments.

Attention to diversity in women's attitudes toward farming and in women's patterns of farm work activity expands our understanding of the linkage between agrarian structure, regional history, and the behavior and values of individual farm women. We combine several disciplinary and methodological approaches to reveal patterns in work and values in a...

This study examines macro-micro linkages between development context and fertility. We extend two conceptual approaches on the social context of fertility to an alternative development setting, the extractive periphery, represented by Ecuador's Amazon, Focus is on how relationships between young women's social structural positions and fertility are...

A relatively large literature examines the responses of households and individuals to economic decline. Although analysts look at a variety of responses, most studies remain inwardly directed toward households' or members' adaptations and survival strategies. This study extends the literature by examining outwardly directed, political action. Data...

During economic downturns, traditional gender allocations of labor have been considered to vary more than in prosperous times. While most studies have examined the division of labor in the household or in paid employment, we examined it where both intersect, in family-owned and family-operated enterprises in the farm sector of the 1980s. This conte...

During the 1980s, the rural economy experienced extensive restructuring, evidenced in the farm crisis and changes in other traditional rural industries. This study focuses on a segment of the rural population particularly affected by these changes: farm women and men in the Midwest. We examine how experiences of farm and broader rural restructuring...

Abstract The literature on the Goldschmidt (1978a) hypothesis has passed through distinct stages. This article is a commentary on the present status of the literature and particularly on a recent article by Barnes and Blevins (1992). Our arguments draw in large part from our previous work. Researchers in the 1970s and early 1980s were concerned mai...

Effective program evaluation provides feedback from participants that can be used to make improvements and justify program expenditures. This study describes a method of evaluating the benefits of Business Retention and Expansion (R&E) visitation programs. The effectiveness of this relatively new economic development strategy has not been explored...

In this study I will examine the patterns of women’s participation in the guerrilla struggles of Latin American revolutionary movements. Women’s participation in such struggles has long been overlooked. Analyses of Latin American women’s political behavior tend to be limited to conventional political processes, such as voting and office-holding, wh...

Abstract The recent farm financial crisis has resulted in a rapid and dramatic economic decline for many farmers. Although researchers have long observed that economic crisis and vulnerability contribute to social-psychological depression, few studies have examined the links between farm restructuring and the depression process. We address this iss...

During the farm crisis of the 1980s, many midwestern farm families suffered financial distress, but by 1989 an uneven financial recovery was under way. This report summarizes data collected from 388 Ohio farm operators (a 38.8% response rate) and 353 spouses as part of a large survey conducted in 12 North Central states. The purpose of the survey w...

What are the impacts of agrarian origins and industrial experience upon worker militancy? Investigations of this question have been framed by reference to the experiences of newly proletarianized workers‐their path to the factory via farming and their industrial experience or socialization into nonfarm working class life. Some argue that newly prol...

Community development practitioners long have been concerned with the effects of farm structure on community socioeconomic conditions. Most studies examining the impacts of farming have focused on economic outcomes, with little research directed toward noneconomic outcomes, such as health. This study examines the effects of three patterns of farm s...

Analyzes the effects of differentiated farm structures and industry structures on socioeconomic conditions in 3037 counties for 2 time periods, 1970 and 1980. The results indicate that employment in core industry and a pattern of family farming contribute to more favorable socioeconomic conditions. Both peripheral and state employment lower socioec...

Many researchers advocate active local government responses to poverty and other economic disparities. In doing so, they raise a generally unexplored question: can local governments themselves influence poverty net of other determinants? This study extends past research in two ways by (1) analyzing the poverty-reducing role of county governments an...

This paper examines how communities across the U.S. are affected by decentralization and the unfolding of neo-liberalism. While there is a large, cross-national literature on decentralized government and neo-liberalism, little research has explored this topic at the subnational scale. Here, I focus on the empirical case of county governments, now t...