Solon T. Kimball

Community Study: Retrospect and Prospect

Community study as a method of social science has undergone extensive transformation since its inception and now exhibits some divergence from the traditional use of such concepts as structure, function, and role. Those who have utilized subtantive findings from community studies to establish the validity of a priori theories have not understood the process through which new insights are won in the use of the community-study method. The new emphasis is upon the search for principles of process and the nature of change in contrast to the original descriptive and taxonomic orientation. The development of methods for system, interaction, and event analysis have proved to be the most important theoretical tools in this advance.

Rural Social Organization and Co-Operative Labor

The far-reaching changes which are everywhere apparent in rural life have as yet failed to produce any agreement as to fundamental causes. These may be discovered in the interdependence of rural technology, sentiment systems, relational structures, and social classes. This interdependence, as well as the transformation, is revealed in the manner in which the agricultural activities are organized in relation to technology. The nature of such co-operative effortsand their significance to changing rural social organization is describe here.