10/29/2007

Rural Sociologist Recognized for Work on Regional Inequities

Writer:

Martha Filipic
filipic.3@cfaes.osu.edu
(614) 292-9833

Source:

Linda Lobao, Human and Community Resource Development
lobao.1@osu.edu
(614) 292-6394

COLUMBUS, Ohio – When studying inequality, most sociologists focus on the local level -- cities, communities, and neighborhoods -- or examine differences across national boundaries. But until recently, there was no cohesive work examining inequality across regions within a nation with a sociological perspective. Linda Lobao's work has helped filled that gap.

Lobao, a professor of rural sociology in Ohio State University's College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, has been recognized for that work by being named as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"I wanted to understand why poverty and prosperity varied across different parts of the country," said Lobao, who is also a researcher with the college's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. "But when I began my research on this topic in the 1980s, I found relatively little research. Sociologists had not really looked at this from a critical or analytical standpoint. Why are people in the South still poorer than those in the North? Why does the Appalachian region remain poor despite decades of federal programs aimed at this region? Why do pockets of poverty exist across the U.S. interior? Geographers and economists have studied regional well-being, but sociologists are comparative latecomers."

The fact that sociologists are examining regional inequities brings new perspective to the topic, Lobao said. While issues of inequity are just a small part of other fields, "The whole discipline of sociology revolves around inequalities," she said. "And within sociology, there's an enormous amount of work on neighborhood or community poverty, and on poverty on an international scale. I wanted to take that sociological lens that has been so well developed and focus it on spatial inequality on a regional basis."

Lobao's first book, Locality and Inequality: Farm Structure, Industry Structure, and Socioeconomic Conditions (State University of New York Press, 1990), examined how community forces, such as services, manufacturing, government and civic action, affected the development and impacts of large-scale industrial farming in different regions. Her findings suggested that stronger laws regulating such farming in the Midwest led to few adverse impacts on communities, while weaker regulations and poorer quality jobs in the South led to more severe impacts in those communities. The work was cited as the first to bridge the gap in theoretical work on farming and community.

As she pursued the idea of spatial inequities in various research projects and discussed it with colleagues, Lobao was awarded a grant sponsored by the American Sociological Association and the National Science Foundation to do the legwork to advance the discipline. That resulted in a 2002 workshop at Ohio State that attracted more than two dozen scholars and resulted in the book, The Sociology of Spatial Inequality (State University of New York Press, 2007), edited by Lobao and two colleagues, Gregory Hooks of Washington State University and Ann R. Tickamyer of Ohio University.

Lobao's approach stresses local economic structures (such as the quality and quantity of jobs); institutional arrangements (including civil society and government); and regionally specific factors as the sources of inequalities in socioeconomic conditions across localities. Where higher-quality jobs are more numerous, where civil society and the social safety net are stronger, and where regions have locational advantages, poverty and income inequality tend to be lower and general family incomes are higher.

In 2004, the Rural Sociological Society, the discipline’s major professional association, selected Lobao for their Excellence in Research Award, their highest honor for scholarship. The Award Committee described her as "catapult[ing] rural sociological work into the top sociology as well as geography journals, bringing immense visibility of rural sociology to external publics -- both scholarly and policy audiences." The committee stated that "more than anyone else in the U.S.," Lobao is "building a truly comprehensive and comparative sociology of regional inequality."

Lobao sees spatial inequality as evolving into a new specialty in sociology. But for now, the research questions it raises simply fascinate her:

• The U.S. coasts are more prosperous than the interior of the country. Why does this occur? Why are the highest poverty rates over the last forty years continually found in parts of Appalachia, Great Plains, and Mississippi Delta while New England and much of the Midwest remain relatively well-off, even after suffering a massive industrial downturn post-1970?
• Small wealthy communities are often surrounded by pockets of less-prosperous areas where service workers, teachers and others who work within that community live but often have long commute times. What are the implications of these inequities?
• Earning a college degree tends to have less economic benefit in rural areas than urban areas. "They can be the same type of person, with the same level of education, but they don't get the payoff," Lobao said. What does such a disparity mean for regional economies and family incomes?
• How do government programs and policies impact spatial inequalities? For example, federal welfare programs are usually not looked at in spatial terms. But in 1996, welfare policy was decentralized to states and counties, which meant that localities with good administrative capacities such as grant writers on staff would be able to better compete for funds. Plus, one of the mandates of welfare reform was the need to move former recipients into jobs, but poorer states and counties were less successful at this task because there were fewer employment opportunities. Such inequities have spatial components that often go unrecognized, Lobao said. Similarly, defense funding isn't usually seen in regional terms, but its benefits largely go to regions of the country that are home to the defense industry. Social Security and other programs geared to the elderly are usually viewed on a national scale, but they impact rural areas, which tend to have a higher population of elderly people, to a much greater degree.

Lobao hopes that examining spatial inequalities on a regional basis could provide answers for some of society's most longstanding problems. "This research area has been building for a long time," she said. "It's pulling together much of the work on economic, governmental and community processes that I've done throughout my career."

Lobao was president of the Rural Sociological Society in 2002-2003. She is a professor in the Department of Human and Community Resource Development and also holds appointments in the departments of Sociology and Geography in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

-30-