Company Towns in the Americas


Book Description

Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City). Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs. The editors’ introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.







Locality, Memory, Reconstruction


Book Description

This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of culture in single-industry communities facing the loss of their major industry. In a series of innovative case studies extending from New Zealand and Slovenia to the contemporary Nordic and Baltic States, the contributors address a wide range of topical issues. These include the role of the community’s past as a marker of its newly reconstructed identity and the importance of local traditions, landscapes, and place-related memories in post-industrial communities formerly dependent on one single employer or industry. The empirical case studies emphasise the role of cultural memory and local identity as communal strategies of survival and perseverance in such places and provide fresh perspectives into this turn to culture. The four parts of the book address such topics as the symbolic governance of change, tradition as capital, narratives as collective memories, and post-Soviet transition in comparative perspective. The team of international contributors hails from Australia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, and Slovenia and represents the fields of sociology, cultural policy, cultural history, landscape studies, and geography.




Community Organization


Book Description




Banking on Coal


Book Description




Towards Sustainable Management of the Boreal Forest


Book Description

Presenting a summary of the development in boreal forest management, this book provides a progressive vision for some of the world's northern forests. It includes a selection of chapters based on the research conducted by the Sustainable Forest Management Network across Canada. It includes a number of case histories.




Resource Communities


Book Description

This volume consists of eleven original papers that survey the state of the art in research and public policy regarding specific problems and opportunities confronted by resource communities. The papers are international in scope, dealing with the experiences of resource communities in four nations—Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United




Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives


Book Description

Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives examines the repercussions of economic globalization on several manufacturing-dependent rural communities in Canada. Foregrounding a distinct interest in the 'grassroots' effects of such contemporary corporate strategies as plant closures and downsizing, authors Anthony Winson and Belinda Leach consider the impact of this restructuring on the residents of various communities. The authors argue that the new rural economy involves a fundamental shift in the stability and security of people's lives and, ultimately, it causes wrenching change and an arduous struggle as rural dwellers struggle to rebuild their lives in the new economic terrain. Beginning with broader theoretical and empirical literature on global changes in the economy and the effects of these changes on labour, the text then focuses exploration on manufacturing in Ontario with an analysis of five community case studies. Winson and Leach give considerable attention to the testimony of numerous residents; they report on in-depth interviews with key respondents and blue-collar workers in five separate communities, ranging from diverse manufacturing towns to single-industry settlements. The result is an intimate contextual knowledge of the workers' lives and their attempts to adapt to the tumultuous economic terrain of 1990s rural Canada. Winner of the John Porter Prize for 2003, awarded by the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association.




Health in Rural Canada


Book Description

Health research in Canada has mostly focused on urban areas, often overlooking the unique issues faced by Canadians living in rural and remote areas. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the state of rural health and health care in Canada, from coast to coast and in northern communities. Three themes are highlighted: rural places matter to health, rural places are unique, and rural places are dynamic. The contributors bring insights and methodologies from nursing, social work, geography, epidemiology, and sociology and from community-based research to a full spectrum of topics: health literacy, rural health care delivery and training, Aboriginal health, web-based services and their application, rural palliative care, and rural health research and policy. Taken together, these wide-ranging and multifaceted explorations of the dynamic relationship between health and place offer researchers and policy-makers, students and practitioners a valuable resource for understanding the special, ever-changing needs of rural communities.




Conrail Changes and Their Impact on Small Business


Book Description