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




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, Fordl ndia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, R o 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.




Canadiana


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Social Transformation in Rural Canada


Book Description

The rapidly changing nature of life in Canadian rural communities is more than a simple response to economic conditions. People living in rural places are part of a new social agenda characterized by transformation of livelihoods, landscapes, and social relations – these profound changes invite us to reconsider the meanings of community, culture, and citizenship. Social Transformation in Rural Canada presents the work of researchers from a variety of fields who explore the dynamics of social transformation in rural settlements across several regions and sectors of the Canadian landscape. This volume provides a nuanced portrait of how local forms of action, adaptation, identity, and imagination are reshaping aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities in rural Canada. Unlike many previous studies, this work looks at rural communities not simply as places affected by external forces, but as incubators of change and social units with agency and purpose, many of which provide exemplary models for other communities facing challenges of transition.