Patrick H Mooney

University of Kentucky | UKY · Department of Sociology

Food regime analysis and some governance approaches contend that the construction of the next food regime depends on social movements and that novel conceptualizations as well as meso-level approaches are needed. A revision of field theory is employed to analyze food policy councils (FPCs) as a movement that represents a North American manifestatio...

This chapter seeks to address questions related to the convergence among alternative agrifood movements as well as the convergence between alternative and conventional practices with a focus on local movements. We reconstruct the common conflation of the alternative/conventional binary into a multidimensional measure that recognizes the complex int...

The current call for public scholarship and community engagement by universities and disciplinary organizations has created opportunities to develop innovative ways to integrate research, instruction, and outreach. This article discusses a collaboration among scholars at the University of Kentucky and alternative agrifood movement organizations tha...

Abstract  This article demonstrates Gamson's claim that behind the apparent agreement implied by “consensus frames” lies considerable dissensus. Ironically, the very potency of consensus frames may generate contested claims to the ownership of a social problem. Food security is a potent consensus frame that has generated at least three distinct col...

Despite significant contributions, movement frame analyses have tended to focus on ideological construction within and between social movement organizations at single moments in time or during protest cycles. By integrating framing and abeyance concepts, this article extends the framing perspective to examine historical continuities, transformation...

This paper examines the usefulness of the new social movements (NSMs) paradigm in the changing context of East European post-communist societies and their agricultural systems and rural communities. Starting with statements formulated in Western sociology in the context of Western democratic societies about NSMs as a protest against modernity, the...

Rural economies We must begin with the specification of our assumptions regarding the term ‘rural economies’; we do not view the rural as strictly separable from the urban, the suburban, or any other spatial form of the ‘non-rural’ . Neither can we view the economy as entirely separable from the political, the cultural, the social, etc. Hence, we b...

The Handbook of Rural Studies represents the vitality and theoretical innovation at work in rural studies. It shows how political economy and the "cultural turn" have led to very significant new thinking in the cultural representations of: rurality; nature; sustainability; new economies; power and rurality; new consumerism; and exclusion and rurali...

Abstract Sustainable development demands institutions manage the conflicts and struggles that inevitably arise over material and ideal interests. While current cooperative theory privileges the economic element, a political economy of cooperation emphasizes cooperatives' tentative bridging of economic and political spheres with a democratic ethos....

More than 2 decades have passed since the theoretical grounding of rural sociology was challenged with the contention that rural is a geographical and not a sociological concept. Other than a temporary shift toward a neo-Marxian focus on social relations of production in rural space, this challenge has been largely unmet, despite continued empirica...

This paper is written from a sociology of science/rhetoric of science perspective. The paper critiques the central rhetorical constructions of neoclassical economic studies as applied to agricultural cooperative conversions. Conversions refer to the internal re-structurings, sell-outs, and hybridizations of cooperative organizational form to invest...

Abstract In recent years, several agricultural cooperatives have undergone significant restructuring. Some have been taken through a conversion process and have been reorganized as “investor-oriented firms” (IOFs). This phenomenon has attracted the interest of agricultural economists, but it has not been analyzed by sociologists. This article exami...

Recent theoretical developments in economic theory have attempted to relax the assumption that human behavior is guided by “tight calculation” of profit-maximization. Harvey Liebenstein's notion of X-efficiency is a particularly important development in this regard. This article argues, however, that X-efficiency theory does not go far enough in re...

The current credit crisis is just as often interpreted as another 'last gasp' of the family farm. It is hypothesized that the demise of credit-based production is more likely to be followed by rent-based production than by purely capitalist production in the form of wage labor. A historical cycle is postulated in which tenancy and indebtedness repl...

Five social relations in agricultural production are examined with respect to the four specified indicators of class location. The concrete articulation of these forms in the present conjuncture undermines the bipolar trajectory of class structure in traditional Marxist theory. Capitalist and proletarian class traits in simple commodity production...

Examines the Mann-Dickinson thesis, which contends that the noncoincidence of labor time and production time in the production process of certain agricultural commodities poses an impediment to capitalist penetration. Neither of these characteristics is found to actually do so in US agriculture. Also finds that the labor/production time thesis is n...