Book Reviews

One Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty, edited byRoy L. Prosterman, Robert Mitchell, and Tim Hanstad, Leiden,Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2009. 454 pp. $39.95 (paper).ISBN: 978-90-8728-064-2.

Reviewed by Uchendu E. ChigbuTechnische Universität, Munich, Germany

Issues pertaining to the connection between land and poverty have elic-ited a lot of research over the last half century, more than at any othertime in the history of research on land. This extensive work providesanswers to several previously unanswered questions, surveying varioustheoretical arguments and case studies. Yet the puzzle posed by theconnections of land inaccessibility, land tenure, and land-tenure inse-curity to poverty remains unsolved. Considering the urgency neededin the fight against global poverty, the publication of One BillionRising is most timely. The book is not just an intellectual contribu-tion to the global Make Poverty History campaign but a call to actionto governments, nongovernmental organizations, academics, andresearchers on land matters to brace for the challenges of findingbetter answers to the questions posed about land—in the context of astrategy for alleviating global poverty. Also, the book, being an over-view of the lessons gained by the authors from the many works of theRural Development Institute, is a direct unveiling of their decades-oldexperience in land-tenure studies. It is undoubtedly an invaluable con-tribution to knowledge in land studies. It provides a sort of encyclope-dic demonstration of the incalculable importance of land access andtenure security in the alleviation of poverty in low- and middle-incomeeconomies.ruso_22 514..530

One Billion Rising is a collection of nine clearly written, well-organized,and relevant research essays by seven experienced experts in global landresearch. It has a global appeal in the breadth and length of land topicspresented. The book will appeal to a wide variety of audiences, rangingfrom the graduate level to researchers and practitioners in the variousland professions. However, due to its clear prose, undergraduate audi-ences within the social and environmental sciences may also find itinvaluable. The book is broken into chapters covering topics such asland tenure, land rights, poverty, gender, and various issues on landreform, as well as a conclusion.

Rural Sociology 75(3), 2010, pp. 514–530DOI: 10.1111/j.1549-0831.2010.00022.xCopyright © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Along with a preface by Joseph E. Stiglitz, the book’s introductionsets the pace for a discussion of critical issues in land-tenure reform.The first three chapters provide elaborately developed opinions on“poverty, law and land tenure reform,” “tenancy reform,” and “landredistribution” (17–107) as strategies for the alleviation of globalpoverty. The book’s methodology is clear, and if the main goal of theauthors was to strike a balance between academics and advocacy, it wascertainly achieved. The volume mixes the best of scholarly researchwith social and intellectual advocacy on “law, land and alleviation ofglobal poverty” (title page) as an approach to knowledge dissemina-tion. Text boxes and conceptual diagrams serve as illustrative instru-ments in the book. These provide for easy understanding of thevarious models the authors recommend. Overall, the book analyzes thevarious advantages and disadvantages involved in the adoption of dif-ferent land-based approaches to poverty alleviation through positiveand negative case studies.

Taking a somewhat radical tone, the book advocates for “micro-plotsfor the rural poor” (153) in its fourth chapter. Are Prosterman, Mitchell,Hanstad, and their colleagues a bunch of “Panglossian idealists”?(9)—certainly not! They proffer “micro-plot allocation programs” as “aviable alternative” (153) for redistribution reforms but cautiously call for“assessing the suitability of micro-plot programs” (164) prior to under-taking this option. They provide a methodical step-by-step analysis of the“appropriateness of micro-plot allocation” (167) necessary for achievingthis with special mention of the issue of “addressing cultural barriers”(180). Chapter 5 goes on to treat the issue of “gender and land reform”from a global perspective. Here the book asserts that “property shouldbe viewed in the context of the whole family and the distribution ofwealth within the family” (227).

The next two chapters deal with land tenure in India and China,respectively. The essays make a good case for advocating that India’ssuccess in land tenure reform “should not be limited to its borders” as itoffers “valuable lessons to other countries” (266). In the case of China,the focus is on a historical analysis of the country’s movement “fromcollective to household tenure,” with one conclusion being that othercountries in need of or still in the process of “decollectivization” (277)may learn some “potentially useful” lessons. Could the use of these twocase studies pose a problem to some of the book’s targeted audience inthe course of attaining a global reach? It is difficult to say; however, coreAfricanist scholars on land may view the book as displaying a sort ofimbalance, with no specific chapter dedicated to an African case.Because Africa receives special priority in the fight against global

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poverty, a full chapter case study from the continent would have addedmore value to its breadth. This quibble aside, the book should provokeno objections from a neutral reader.

It is important to note that this book is not another version ofHernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs inthe West and Fails Everywhere Else. This book charts its own course byoffering a fresh perspective on land. In Chapter 8, the book’s projec-tion of “formalization of rights to land” (333) as a major strategy leadsto answers to critical questions such as these: What circumstances maylead to the formalization of land rights? What type of rights can beformalized on land? How can formalization of land rightsdirectly benefit the poor? How can the system of formalization of landrights be made trustworthy, affordable, and sustainable? Chapter 9,viewing global poverty from a rural perspective, calls for the possibilityof using “land rights legal aid” (377) as an intervention “for poorfamilies who use, own or seek access to land” due to its generalapplicability and low risk. In the book’s concluding reflections,Prosterman acknowledges the present and future challenges posed bythe provision of secure land property rights to the world’s poor andcalls for all interested parties to get involved in the search for asolution.

Rural Ageing: A Good Place to Grow Old? Edited by Norah Keating, Bristol,UK: Policy Press, University of Bristol, 2008. 168 pp. $39.95 (paper).ISBN: 9781861349019.

Reviewed by Lisa M. CurchSUNY College at Oneonta

This book, edited by Norah Keating, takes the reader to an area of studyat the crossroads of rural sociology and environmental/geographicalgerontology, with its focus on aging and the life course in rural areas. Itis an area that has been researched in limited fashion, as Keating and thecontributors point out. Thus, myths and stereotypes about older adultsand growing old in rural places continue to abound, particularly theromantic notion of the fiercely independent, resilient elder (probably aretired farmer), who has close-knit social relations in the community andan enduring bond with the land (usually a tranquil and pastoral setting),until his or her dying day. It’s not that this person does not at all exist inreal life, but rather, because Keating becomes the academic version ofDiscovery Channel’s MythBusters, the reader can clearly see that the

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variety of people and lives in rural places belie such a homogenous viewof rural aging.

The question in its title reveals the ultimate purpose of the book:Are rural places good places to grow old? If the myths are to bebelieved, then the answer is yes. But if documented evidence from theresearch reported in this volume is to be believed, then (spoiler alert)the answer is: it depends. Although the “answer” is not given in thebook until the last chapter, one can sense that this is the answer fromthe very beginning in the first chapter. But that does not ruin thejourney toward such an answer. It is a journey that starts with a straight-forward and clear explanation of the purpose of the book, as well asthe values and theoretical perspectives that subsequent chapters take.The overriding framework is a critical human ecology perspective; inaddition, the critical gerontology and life-course perspectives are incor-porated into the theoretical lens of the book. Exploring the diversity ofexperiences of rural aging thus becomes a de facto mandate of thebook.

The book starts at the beginning, conceptually speaking, by discussinghow “rural” is defined. For how can we know if a rural place is indeed agood place to grow old, if we do not know what “rural” entails? NorahKeating and Judith Phillips tackle this issue and in recognizing thedebate over how to define and conceive of “rural,” they use two broadconceptualizations: rural as a type of locality and as a social construction.In addition, the book explores the concept of environment and themultiple dimensions that it can represent; the focus of the book isostensibly on the microenvironments of the immediate physical andsocial environments of older adults and the macroenvironments of com-munity and policy. But the social and community environments ulti-mately receive the most attention, with much less given to the physicaland policy environments. This is perhaps because the emphasis is onwhether rural areas are good places to grow old, with how to make ruralareas good places to grow old as a more secondary, implied question.

Additionally, when the first chapter notes that “Scholars whose chap-ters make up this book are from Europe and North America” (8),readers should take that to mean England and Canada. Recent studiesfrom the United States and from other parts of the world, such asAustralia, are cited, but the studies in the book were conducted in ruralareas of England and Canada. This is a caveat for American readers ofthe book. That does not mean that there is not much to be learned aboutrural aging for others outside these two countries, especially the lesson ofdiversity among rural elders and their aging experiences. But readersshould be aware.

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In the second chapter, Tamara Daly and Gordon Grant delve into thelife-course perspective on aging and disability in rural places. As I noted,Chapter 1 addresses the life-course perspective, but this chapter expli-cates it more fully. However, the reason for the inclusion of disability isnot readily apparent, and neither the relation between aging and dis-ability nor the relation of the concept of “rural” to this perspective areexplored to the extent that the reader sees these pieces fit together. Asa theoretical treatment of the issues it purports to better understand, itis somewhat wanting. The chapter is nonetheless an apt overview of thelife-course perspective and its various assumptions and applications; theuninitiated in this theoretical framework should have a pretty good ideaof what it is all about after reading the chapter.

The bulk of the volume is a well-put-together collection of researchstudies and literature reviews on aspects of rural aging. An interestingaspect of the book is that the majority of the studies presented arequalitative. Those who have firsthand knowledge provide the evidencefor and against whether rural areas are good places for aging. Theexperiences and the voices of rural elders themselves take center stage;older adults are given the opportunity to express what living in a ruralarea means to them. The experiences of those who work with olderadults are also given expression in a couple of chapters on rural home-care and respite programs. To be sure, there are quantitative findingspresented as well, highlighted in the chapters on social participation.

The topics covered by the chapters address significant areas forunderstanding rural aging and the advantages and disadvantages tobeing elderly in rural places; all fit within the human ecological frame-work, but some chapters do better at taking a critical perspective thanothers. There is a nice logical progression as the chapters flow from themicro to the macro level. The first study, by Sherry Ann Chapman andSheila Peace, examines aging in relation to identity and the self and asinteracting with place. The chapter underscores the significance of thenatural and social elements of rural places, and the changing of suchelements, as they affect how elders make sense of aging. The connectionto the land makes rural aging unique for some, and this idea should beexplored further in rural studies. As G. Clare Wenger and Norah Keatingpoint out in their chapter, do not count on similar patterns of socialinteractions among all rural elders. In examining changes in socialsupport networks of rural older adults over time, Wenger and Keatingdemonstrate diversity in types of support networks and the salience of alife-course perspective for understanding social convoys—close intimaterelationships that people have after retirement, and which they dependupon for social support—in later life. The myth of the close-knit rural

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community is disproved to some extent by the finding that the ruralcommunity is not universally supportive of elders.

The chapters by Joanie Sims-Gould and Anne Martin-Matthews, andNeena L. Chappell, Bonnie Schroeder, and Michelle Gibbens involveperspectives of those who work with elders and their families. Sims-Gould and Martin-Matthews conclude that when it comes to home-careservice provision, it is not just a matter of whether or not services areprovided but that policies relevant to home care have to consider therural context in which those services are provided and the distinctivechallenges involved. Exactly how policies might do this is not clearlyindicated, however. Chappell, Schroeder, and Gibbens show how thespecial circumstances of rural service provision can be seen in thedevelopment of creative solutions to challenges by different respite-care demonstration projects. These projects also show that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work for formal respite programs, againillustrating the diversity of rural areas.

Janet Fast and Jenny de Jong Gierveld, and Julia Rozanova,Donna Dosman, and Jenny de Jong Gierveld in their two chaptersfocus on social participation. While Fast and der Jong Gierveldexplore how various forms of social participation can affect subjectivesocial integration in a rural community, Rozanova, Dosman, and derJong Gierveld explore how characteristics of the rural community itselfcan affect levels of social participation. Bonnie Dobbs and LaurelStrain then take the reader into a consideration of one of the mostimportant mechanisms for social participation and integration—driving. The authors note that making and maintaining socialconnections is affected by mobility, which for most in rural areasmeans reliance on private vehicles. Thus, access to a car as either adriver or a passenger has a critical role in the social environment ofrural elders.

Thomas Scharf and Bernadette Bartlam’s chapter shines, in terms oftheir taking a critical perspective in their research. To understand dis-advantage among rural elders, the authors focus on social exclusion.Noting the lack of research in this area, especially as social exclusion isnot as recognizable in rural communities, the authors probe differentmanifestations of social exclusion. What they find offers both examplesof social exclusion and counterexamples in the rural communitiesstudied. As a result, there are key features of social exclusion in ruralareas that have policy implications, both direct and indirect, for agingrural adults, and these implications are fleshed out more here than inother chapters. Jacquie Eales, Janice Keefe, and Norah Keating also takea critical perspective, though less obviously, in that the traditional

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approach to creating age-friendly communities, the “resourcesapproach,” is deemed inadequate for creating truly age-friendly commu-nities, as it lacks an appreciation of diversity among older adults andtheir needs. Therefore, there is no one model for age-friendly commu-nities; communities have to discover what “age-friendly” means to theirown residents. As the authors so succinctly note in their conclusion(120), “Context matters.”

In some books, the concluding chapter is a letdown. There is muchrepetition of what was previously reported and stating of the obvious.Perhaps the obvious should be stated, but then discussion should gobeyond that, to explore what might not be so obvious, especially forreaders new to the topic. But the last chapter here, “Revisiting RuralAgeing,” is one of the book’s strengths. Here is where Keating ties thestrands together, analyzing the various studies and wrapping the resultsin a nice, neat package. The overview of the previous work is not a simplerehashing but rather is insightful, making astute connections among thestudies and their findings. Keating acts as a discussant at a conferencepaper session, highlighting the ways in which the studies complementone another and overall contribute to our understanding of rural agingexperiences. Keating revisits the main question of the book in an engag-ing manner and, of course, comes to her conclusion, the answer to thequestion. But you already know the answer.

Overall, students, scholars, and professionals in sociology, gerontol-ogy, and geography will find this book useful and thought provoking.The contributors have constructed a picture of rural aging in whichcontext does indeed matter, and the diversity found in rural life meansthat there is no one way to conceive of issues of rural aging and no oneway to address such issues in policy and practice. While there are cer-tainly some issues particular to rural areas, that does not mean that theywill be experienced in the same way by all rural elders. Being able tograsp both similarities and differences in rural aging is being able to seethe whole picture of rural aging.

College Life through the Eyes of Students, by Mary Grigsby, Albany, NY: SUNYPress, 2009. 241 pp. $24.95 (paper). ISBN: 9781438426204.

Reviewed by Brandn Q. GreenPennsylvania State University

In College Life through the Eyes of Students, Mary Grigsby presents an under-graduate’s experience as a complex process of self-identity formation.

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Whether she is exploring the relationships students have with theirparents, or the social implications of a major football game, this is not abook that judges. Rather, Grigsby’s tone and candor convey the perspec-tive of a sympathetic researcher, professor, parent, and friend. Each ofthese identities informs her perspective as she undertakes a thoroughqualitative study of Midwestern State University.

Grigsby situates her study in two broad bodies of literature. The firstcomprises the qualitative research projects done on the lives of under-graduates. By placing her study alongside studies by Clark and Trow(1966), Horowitz (1987), and Bank (2003), she is able to further specifyideal types of college student classifications. Grigsby’s explicit feministepistemology enables her to highlight the different ways gender, race,class, and ethnicity influence how students respond to the pressures oflate modernity. To place her interviewed students within the broadercultural trajectory, Grigsby relies upon a second area of literature, com-posed of studies on relationships and identity construction in contempo-rary America. Most significant for her project are Lasch’s (1978) Culture ofNarcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Giddens’s(1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, and Bauman’s (2001) The IndividualizedSociety. These theoretical foundations support Grigsby’s analysis of collegestudent identity building and are explicitly overviewed in one of herappendixes. Accepting the theoretical moorings of these researchers andthinkers is essential to accepting Grigsby’s perspective on college stu-dents’ experiences.

Her study is built on the observation that students are makingmeaning of their lives in the caldron of a highly individualistic, choice-based college campus. Grigsby contextualizes this college culture withinthe broader trends of contemporary American life. Much of her analysisfocuses on the tensions of developing oneself for economic viability andseeking to be recognized as successful at the main task of college life,making friends. She explains five ideal types of students: careerist, whovalues getting skills for the job market; credentialist, who values a degreefor the status security; collegiate, who values the social aspects; alterna-tive collegiate, who values the social aspects but through non-university-sanctioned groups; and the academic, who values learning. Grigsby takesspecial care at explicating these types through rich descriptive interviewsegments over the course of 40 pages in the heart of the book. Theimportance she places upon these descriptions reveals the weight sheassigns to her types as a tool for understanding the identity-makingoptions available to undergraduate students.

Grigsby sets these types within the broader individualistic ethos ofuniversity culture, an ethos she distinguishes into three main pathways for

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becoming an autonomous individual and thereby finding fulfillment. Astudent can follow the traditionalist blueprint and look to social-statusroles for self-identity. A student can find fulfillment by seeking a private-life-centered path that accents consumptive practices for status. A studentcan also find a path through his or her ability to negotiate relationships.Within one of the three blueprints, as Grigsby calls them, the student aimsto achieve self-satisfying autonomy and self-hood. She is careful to cautionthe reader against placing these blueprints, or the ideal types, within anytype of progressing or development framework. Rather, they should beunderstood within the complex networks of relationships, social struc-tures, and interactions that shape the choices of college students.

She explores how financial support changes the power dynamics ofparental relationships and how these differ for men and women. Byfocusing on the broader cultural depictions of college life (her favoriteexample is the movie Van Wilder) and how these depictions influencethe possible choices students have for identify formation, she groundsher work in the contemporary climate of American pop culture andeconomic production. This, however, increases the text’s risk ofquickly becoming antiquated due to the accelerating nature of changein the Internet age. Grigsby’s study took place just as Facebook becamea staple of college life, and she is able to sneak this new technologyinto her study, but it is likely her snapshot approach will depict abygone version of campus life in the next 10 years. And yet thesetypologies may very well transcend the influences new technologieshave on each generation.

College Life through the Eyes of Students targets parents, professors, andacademic administrators who help to create the contexts within whichundergraduate identity work takes place. Professors could use thebook, especially the interview segments, to facilitate discussion amongadvanced undergraduates about the types she clarifies. She relegatesmuch of the literature discussion, statistical information, and method-ological justifications to the appendixes to make the text more acces-sible and less scholarly sounding without losing her rigor. Thecontribution of her book is revealed by the title, as she adroitly pro-vides her reader with the perspective of the students. Students are notgoing to college simply to learn the material presented in classes.Instead, they are going to learn how to become members of the socialfabric in which personal ideologies are placed within a middle-classvalue system. Colleges are designed to produce a student who can bean easygoing, individualistic, self-sustaining employee. How collegeleaders respond to Grigsby’s insights is left open, as she stayscommitted to the ideal type of the scholarly researcher, dutifully

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reporting findings and revealing a deeper truth about the nature ofhow undergraduates experience an institution foundational in the livesof each of us.

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine,by Gary Paul Nabhan, Washington, DC: Island Press/ShearwaterBooks, 2009. 223 pp. $24.95 (cloth). ISBN: 1-59726-399-0.

Reviewed by Nan E. JohnsonMichigan State University

Gary Paul Nabhan has written an engaging biography of NikolayVavilov (1887–1943), a Russian plant pathologist and geneticist whobecame one of the global leaders in these fields in the twentiethcentury. In early childhood, the young Moscow-born Nikolay sufferedthrough the harsh Russian famine of 1891–92. His peasant-farmergrandparents suffered even more while they watched their wheat cropfreeze in their field. These personal and familial experiences withfamine shaped Vavilov’s resolve to become a plant breeder in order toboost the supply of food that Russian peasants could grow. Fortunatelyfor Vavilov, his professional goal was consistent with the scientificculture dominant during the czarist dynasty, when his career began,and with the socialist agenda, when the Bolshevik Revolution success-fully overthrew the czar in 1917.

Vavilov concluded that a genetic diversity in agricultural cropsequips plants with the resilience necessary to withstand plagues,blights, and unseasonable swings in rainfall and temperatures thatwould otherwise lead to crop failures. Thus, he coined the idea ofcreating an agricultural gene bank (“museum”) of seeds and roots thatare “heirlooms”: the purest, earliest species of edible plants and roots,plus the seeds or roots of their wild relatives. Also, he theorized thatthe greatest genetic diversity exists on the slopes and high valleys ofmountains, not in the low river valleys. To curate the world’s first com-plete gene bank of edible seeds and tubers, Vavilov became a scientificOdysseus, still the only person who has ever traveled through 64foreign countries on five continents to collect the germ plasm ofaround 380,000 plants.

The purpose of Nabhan’s book is to tell what changes he found whenhe read Vavilov’s travel notes and then retraced some of his journeys onthe five continents. The reader learns that Vavilov found confirmatoryevidence in Tajikistan, Ethiopia, the mesas of the Southwestern United

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States, and the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico that high elevationsare the true hotspots of agro-biodiversity.

Vavilov recognized that not only cross-breeding edible plants butalso planting multiple crops in the same field, conserving water, andpreserving indigenous farmers’ knowledge of agriculture can safeguarda community’s food security (defined as the ability of a community toavoid malnutrition and famine). For example, in the early 1930s,Vavilov saw Hopi and Navajo Indians in the Southwestern UnitedStates growing a variety of crops (corn, beans, squash, and severalkinds of fruit) almost self-sufficiently, despite the fact that the Dust-Bowl drought was just beginning. The Indians planted corn seeds atleast a foot below the ground to capture residual moisture and chan-neled rainwater from atop the mesas to trickle down the slopesonto the terraces that they built to grow their thirstiest crops. WhenNabhan returned there in the mid-2000s, he concluded that dammingthe Colorado River had led to an urban-rural contest for this watersupply that the American Indian farmers have lost. In addition,young Hopis and Navajos are now rejecting farming as a way of life;and their agricultural heritage, not only of seeds but also of knowl-edge, is being lost.

Surely, Vavilov respected the importance of the biological diversity ofseeds and the social diversity in the knowledge of the planters. Yet Iconclude that he was insensitive to the political constraints that deter-mine which seeds get preserved and who profits. For example, duringthe 1932–33 famine in the Soviet Union, Vavilov ignored an order toreturn there to address the food crisis. Instead, he traveled at his gov-ernment’s expense to the Amazonian rain forest, where it is unclear whatnative seeds he brought back to save the 5 million residents of the SovietUnion who died during this latest famine. Vavilov’s political mistakecaused him to fall out of favor with Josef Stalin, to be thrown into prison,and, ironically, to die there of starvation in 1943.

This highly readable book can be used to promote class discussionsabout the agricultural and social values of different plants indigenousto the nations in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and SouthAmerica where Nabhan retraces Vavilov’s prior journeys. I see only twolimitations of this book, and both relate to omitted material. Onedrawback is the failure to discuss why Vavilov never went to Australia,the oldest continent in the world, where there ought to be anotherhotspot of the world’s seeds. Second, there is no discussion of whyVavilov did not balance his trip to the tropical Amazonian rain forestwith a trip to the conifer rain forest in Oregon and Washington (if,indeed, he never went there). Even so, this book can launch discus-

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sions in both undergraduate and graduate classes in rural sociologyabout the variety of hotspots of seed diversity across the globe and canhelp them see that the various cultures and political institutions arejust as challenging as the various climate zones in defining which com-munities suffer from famine or malnutrition and which escape.

Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in theCalifornia Farm Worker Movement, by Marshall Ganz, New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009. 368 pp. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0195162011.

The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s FarmWorker Movement, by Miriam Pawel, New York: Bloomsbury Press,2009. 384 pp. $28.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1596914605.

Reviewed by Philip MartinUC-Davis

California’s 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) was widelyexpected to usher in a new era for farmworkers. The ALRA, the mostproworker and prounion labor relations law in the United States,requires quick elections whose timing is controlled by unions and amake-whole remedy if employers refuse to bargain in good faith—suchemployers can be ordered to pay their workers the difference betweenwhat would have been negotiated and what was actually paid. Further-more, since 2003 California farmworker unions have been able torequest mandatory mediation to achieve a first contract if they areunable to negotiate one; there should be a contract protecting workersand generating dues within seven months of a union being certified asthe representative of farmworkers.

Despite the favorable ALRA, the United Farm Workers (UFW)founded by Cesar Chavez has fewer than 50 contracts and 5,000members in 2010. What went wrong? Three decades ago, the UFW wasexpected to organize most of the 2.5 million hired farmworkers acrossthe United States, which would have made it one of the largest U.S.unions (the Service Employees International Union [SEIU] is currentlythe largest U.S. union, with almost 2 million members).

The ALRA was a self-help tool—it granted rights to farmworkers thatthey were expected to use to form or join unions and bargain for higherwages. There are four major explanations for the failure of the UFW andother farmworker unions to organize farmworkers and transform thefarm-labor market via collective bargaining: union leadership failures,political changes, employer restructuring, and immigration.

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Most books emphasize union leadership failures and politicalchanges in Sacramento to explain why the UFW was unable to transformCalifornia’s farm-labor market. The leadership-failure explanationfocuses on Cesar Chavez, acknowledging his charismatic leadership,which inspired farmworkers and attracted volunteers to La Causa.However, Chavez was unwilling to allow the UFW to become a businessunion that provided services efficiently to its worker-members. Instead,Chavez drove away loyal volunteers in the 1980s, just as the power toappoint policymakers to the state agency administering the ALRA shiftedfrom Democrats to Republicans.

However, the employer restructuring and immigration explanationsmay be more compelling. The UFW had its breakthrough successes in itspeak years of 1966 and 1980 with the California farming subsidiariesof multinationals, Schenley Industries, and United Brands (Chiquitabananas and Sun Harvest), vulnerable to consumer boycotts. BothSchenley and Sun Harvest signed UFW contracts that raised entry-levelwages over 40 percent, an extraordinary accomplishment then or now,to avoid boycotts of their nonfarm products.

These vulnerable-to-boycott farming operations were sold soon aftercontracts were signed, and their land was taken over by growers muchmore likely to use intermediaries to obtain seasonal workers. Chavezsaw farm-labor contractors (FLCs) as the enemy of unions, and theALRA explicitly makes the operator of a farm on which a FLC worksthe employer for union purposes (but not for minimum wage andimmigration purposes). This means that a crew of FLC workers couldmove from farm to farm, vote for the union, and leave the farm withan obligation to bargain, even if the workers who voted for represen-tation never worked on that farm again. Employers avoid FLCsbelieved to have prounion crews and, by bringing both workers andforklifts and trucks to the farm, many FLCs became custom harvestersand thus employers in their own right, a development not anticipatedin the mid-1970s. It has been very hard for unions to organize custom-harvester crews.

Unions, primarily the UFW and the Teamsters, had their maximumimpacts on farm wages and benefits between the mid-1960s and the early1980s, a period of very low immigration. The Bracero Program (anagreement between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Mexicangovernment to facilitate the use of temporary contract agriculturalworkers from Mexico in the United States) ended in 1964, and unau-thorized migration did not begin to surge until 1983, when a then-record1.3 million foreigners were apprehended by the Border Patrol (peakapprehension years were 1986 and 2000, with 1.8 million each year).

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The Teamsters withdrew from the fields in the late 1970s, clearing theway for the UFW to organize farmworkers. With seasonal worker “careers”typically less than 10 years, organizing is a high priority for unions.Organizing was not a priority for the UFW during the 1980s, when theequivalent of the entire farm work force changed, making it no surprisethat many 20-year-old farmworkers by 1990 thought the name “CesarChavez” referred to the Mexican boxer rather than the UFW leader.

Marshall Ganz suggests that sustained organizing could have allowedthe UFW to thrive despite employer changes and immigration that putdownward pressure on wages, while Miriam Pawel shows that Chavez wasnot interested in business unionism. Ganz, a UFW organizer from 1965until the early 1980s, examines the UFW’s “strategic capacity” to wincontracts with grape and lettuce growers in the late 1960s and early1970s. Many large fruit and vegetable growers, believing that unioniza-tion was inevitable, signed contracts with the UFW that raised wages,provided benefits such as health insurance and pensions to even sea-sonal farmworkers, and gave the UFW unprecedented power to be con-sulted over pesticides and other farming-related practices.

Ganz credits Chavez for the UFW’s victories in the 1960s and 1970s,and blames Chavez for the UFW’s decline in the 1980s. The book isprimarily historical, reviewing previous failed efforts to organize farm-workers in the first half of the twentieth century in order to explain howChavez and the UFW succeeded in organizing farmworkers. Ganzattributes the UFW’s success to three factors: motivated leaders, ties tosupporters that ranged from unions and churches to college students,and creative decision making. However, the UFW was unable to developfarmworker union leaders from within because the UFW had no locals,so that members of the ranch committees established on each farm hadno easy way to climb the UFW’s power ladder.

Pawel examines the evolution of the UFW from the 1960s to the 1990svia eight key figures ranging from lawyer Jerry Cohen to minster ChrisHartmire; all had left the UFW by the time Chavez died in 1993. Sheconcludes that Chavez began the UFW practically alone and wound upas the single force directing it, unable and unwilling to share power. Asa Los Angeles Times reporter, Pawel wrote a four-part series critical of theUFW’s financial dealings in January 2006, concluding that “Chavez’sheirs run a web of tax-exempt organizations that exploit his legacy andinvoke the harsh lives of farmworkers to raise millions of dollars in publicand private money, [but] the money does little to improve the lives ofCalifornia farmworkers.”

Pawel’s book recounts the tensions within the UFW between pragma-tists who wanted to create a business union and Chavez, who insisted that

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the UFW be sustained by volunteers, making no exceptions for profes-sionals such as lawyers. Chavez insisted on approving each contract thatwas negotiated, and his insistence that union staff be volunteers led tothe resignation of Eliseo Medina, now a leader of the SEIU.

Today the UFW is a top-down organization headquartered in La Paz,far from the San Joaquin Valley, which has half of the state’s farm-workers. The UFW has never had local unions, meaning that all deci-sions are made or reviewed by “distant” leaders, and there is no naturalladder from worker to local union leader. The UFW reports fewer than5,000 members, as noted earlier, and fewer than 1,000 retirees on itsannual LM-2 financial reports (www.unionreports.gov). They are servedby 64 UFW employees and 11 officers, one of the highest ratios ofemployees to members among unions.

Ganz was a UFW insider who aims to put the UFW’s decade ofsuccesses in a historical and theoretical framework, while Pawel is acritical outsider who interviewed many of those who left the union,but not current UFW leaders. Both books contain a wealth of insights,both in Pawel’s recounting of UFW activities and Ganz’s theoreticalframework.

Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization, 3rd edition, by Anita Chan,Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Berkeley, CA: Universityof California Press, 2009. 408 pp. $22.95 (paper) ISBN:9780520259317.

Reviewed by John ZindaUniversity of Wisconsin

With Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization, authors Anita Chan, RichardMadsen, and Jonathan Unger add a timely update to their epic socialhistory of a community in southeastern China. Their original study washailed as a tour de force upon its publication in 1985. That study,forming the first nine and a half chapters of the new volume, details thetriumphs and travails of the village over the course of collectivization,successive waves of political campaigns, and the thaw following the deathof Mao. Its depth and consistency are all the more impressive given that,like several other influential social-science studies of China at the time,the narrative was constructed entirely on the basis of interviews of formervillage residents in Hong Kong. A follow-up study conducted in the1990s fills the next 50 pages with accounts of changes in the social andeconomic life of the village following its incorporation into labor andagro-export markets centered on Hong Kong. The new content, consti-

528 Rural Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 3, September 2010

tuting the final three chapters, picks up with information collected in2006 and 2007 in a place that was no longer a “dirt-poor” village amidrolling hills but a built-up suburb where the hills had been blasted awayto make level space for factories. Its residents live affluently off rentsthose factories and their migrant laborers deliver. This addition bringsthe story of Chen Village forward, connecting the vagaries of the Mao erato the incongruities of involvement in globalizing projects.

Descriptive rather than theoretical in substance, Chen Village beginswith a thick account of how the ebb and flow of national campaignsplayed out in the concrete experiences of participants between the 1950sand the early 1980s. This narrative is flush with illustrative stories aboutthe role this person or that person took, how that person’s position inthe village’s social hierarchies affected the outcome, and how thebroader population dealt with each about-face. Two big men who arerivals for administrative power, youths sent down from Canton now andagain with news of the next campaign, and various industrious, tor-mented, and obstreperous villagers all play parts. Improvements inmorale and agricultural production are repeatedly stymied by capriciouspolicy turns, as when the order comes down to plant inappropriatewinter crops for national grain sufficiency. Sprouts of entrepreneurshipsurface when a village leader builds a brick works and a grain mill.Intriguing patterns of marital, kin, and production-team relationsemerge from the uncanny intermingling of ascriptive class hierarchies,village power struggles, and traditional practices. If this part of the bookhas theoretical content, it consists in the well-supported assertion thatthe erratic mobilization politics of the Mao period, while its more sobermoments brought material and moral dividends, ultimately underminedresidents’ faith in the state and motivation to undertake collective ven-tures. Thus Chen villagers greeted decollectivization with profit-seekingenthusiasm. But the ambiguities of the Mao period, the gains amid theturmoil, come through in a way that is lacking in many other accounts.

The newer parts present more topical overviews of trends and coun-tertrends in the following four decades. The core theme of these chaptersconcerns the unique experiences of Chen Village with its reforms, inrelation to the larger context of change across China. Because of itsproximity to the export platforms of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, ChenVillage became a locus of new forms of stratification as residents con-nected to new markets, first hiring migrants from other rural areas to tendcash crops, then serving as landlords to migrant factory workers andfactory proctors for foreign investors. For the late 1980s, and again for thefirst decade of the twenty-first century, the authors catalogue local circum-stances with respect to a number of issues: the activities of working-age

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men and women respectively, marital practices, entrepreneurship, statuscompetition and consumerism, education, crime, team and kinship loy-alties, relationships with migrants and foreign investors, and local-stateactivities. Again, each topic is illustrated with vignettes and extendedquotations, which ground the narrative, though the accounts and theirinterconnections are thinner than in the original study.

The newest chapters not only extend the narrative into the currentcentury but expand its scope to cover new social groups that havebecome part of Chen Village’s panorama. The social relations of rentier-ship in a subsidized export processing zone underpin a “mini-welfarestate” that supports villagers’ middle-class lifestyles. An entire chapter isdevoted to the conditions and dilemmas of outsiders, particularly hyper-exploited migrant workers. The authors dwell on continuities and breakswith traditional and Mao-era practices in family relations and the recon-struction of ancestral halls. These chapters are based on field observa-tions and a very small selection of interview respondents. In some cases,this leaves the reader to wonder if something is left out, in a way that theintegrated narrative that begins the book does not.

The key merit of this book is its extended illumination of broaderforces in thick descriptions of a specific context. While they elaborate notheory of socialist rurality, market transition, or neoliberal globalization,the authors indicate and respond to relevant discussions when theirtopical narrative touches upon them. In Chen Village, readers whoseeyes might glaze at the jargon-laden generalities of many works in litera-tures on transition and globalization can witness palpable instances,contextualized in the rich complexity of community life over time.

The stark contrasts across Chen Village’s recent history, couched invivid descriptions and interspersed with references to social-scientificconcepts, provide grist for contemplating a broad sweep of issues inMao-era, reform-era, and contemporary Chinese society. Chen Village isalready frequently used in undergraduate survey courses on Chinesesociety, and is well suited to the task, as it opens doors to all sorts ofdiscussions, from family dynamics to local social structures to nationalpolicies to global production relations. Touching on so many issues, theauthors do not follow many of them in depth. This book could beparticularly useful complemented by more focused studies on particulartopics, such as labor migration or social change in communities thathave remained agricultural. It might also be useful in syllabi coveringmarket transitions in former socialist countries more broadly. ChenVillage provides a panoramic view of life in one community over the pasthalf century, and it is likely to remain a mainstay in introducing peopleto concrete experiences of continuity and change in China.

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