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Record W2778012663

Energy and the Rural Sociological Imagination

2017· article· en· W2778012663 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Thomas M. Beckley

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Rural Social Sciences · 2017
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicAmerican Environmental and Regional History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociologyRural sociologyFlourishingSocial scienceRural areaEnvironmental ethicsEconomic growthAgriculturePolitical scienceEconomicsGeographyLawPsychologySocial psychologyRural development
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Ultimately, society and possibly our species will succeed or fail based on how we deal with three basic human needs, food, water and energy. The overall success or measure of society should be of significant concern to rural sociologists. After all, our task is to study human society-its organization, its functioning, its transformation of material and space. We study the application of human labor to various purposes, issues of equality and inequality, social stratification, power and governance, ownership of and access to critical natural, social, and economic resources. To date, the dominant tradition in rural sociology has involved a detailed examination of social dimensions of our food system, particularly food production. This has been an appropriate line of enquiry as food is a critical resource to the reproduction and flourishing of human society and one that occurs primarily in rural space. A rural sociology of water, I believe, could be another fruitful line of enquiry, but that is a topic for another day. To date, the attention rural sociologists have paid to food and agriculture is grossly disproportionate to the attention paid to energy. A rural sociology of energy, I believe, could be a boon to the discipline and a boon to rural-themed social science journals. Whether we ultimately choose to study the phenomenon more intensively or not, energy issues will continue to have profound effects on rural lives and rural places.The purpose of this manuscript is to provide an overview of past contributions that rural sociologists have made in rural-themed journals to our understanding of the social consequences of energy generation and development, energy transmission, and energy consumption. These aspects of energy have shaped rural life and dramatically altered rural landscapes but to date have not received much scholarly attention in journals devoted to rural social science. The primary focus of this manuscript is inattention to rural energy themes in the United States and Canada, though I review several international journals as well. The decline in farm population (Dewar, Tait, and Wang 2009; Dmitri, Effland, and Conklin 2005), and traditional rural culture in Canada and the United States has led to periodic crises for North American rural sociology, in part because the discipline has been closely tied to one sector, agriculture. Attention to energy extraction, production, transmission and distribution as a social and economic driver in rural places could add some thematic diversity and be a boon to the discipline. Energy social science is growing in leaps and bounds and my sincere hope is that the scholarship devoted to energy impacts on rural places is held in journals and conferences devoted to rural scholarship.I wish to make it clear at the outset that rural sociologists have and are making important contributions scholarship at the intersection of energy issues and sociological phenomena. My argument is that until very recently, these contributions have been made by mavericks seeking opportunities outside the main rural social science journals. I suggest that our collective attention to energy issues in rural social science journals have been scant relative to the opportunity that exists. The social impacts of current and forthcoming energy transitions, whether unconventional oil and gas development, renewable and/or distributed energy systems, will be profound for rural places and rural people. Traditional occupations will change. Communities will need to respond to a changing climate and changing policy and investment trends. All these developments present an opportunity to the discipline.The title of this manuscript pays homage to C. Wright Mills (1959) who popularized the idea of the sociological imagination. It is a term interpreted in many ways, but at its essence it refers to taking a broad view of societal phenomena. It suggests a nonexclusive brand of scholarship that combines history, politics, economics, psychology, and sociology to examine how things are, what happened in the past to make things the way they are, and ultimately to imagine how things might be different. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.620
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.020
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.252
Teacher spread0.240 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2017
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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