Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future

Abstract

Wuthnow, R. (2013). Small-town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Citation: Hardre, P. L. (2017). Book review of "Small-town America: Finding community, shaping the future." Journal of Research in Rural Education, 32(3), 1-4.Robert Wuthnow's Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future is an easy read that belies the importance and complexity of its content. From the start of this book, Wuthnow lays out contrasts in perspective of current and historic issues that shape small towns in the United States. He offers an inside perspective on small and rural communities, with a craft for framing questions clearly, and even provocatively.Wuthnow uses the term "small town" more prominently than "rural," focusing on community size rather than geographic proximity to urban centers. However, rural researchers recognize that small size is a key component of the nature and definition of rural communities, along with locale. The author directly contrasts the characteristics of small towns with those of urban centers and uses the term "rural" alongside "small towns." The reader quickly realizes that Small-Town America is describing the places and issues that represent what rural education researchers recognize as "rural."Style, Balance, and PerspectiveSmall-Town America begins with an overview that provides a broad sense of the range of places labeled as "small towns." Wuthnow then examines conditions that exist in small and rural towns and impact rural education- but are rarely discussed when the focus is on schools. This book broadens the reader's view to a host of sociological and cultural issues that exist in some form, albeit to greater and lesser degrees, in most rural places.Wuthnow makes note of the change and adaptation that has occurred in small communities in response to political, social, and economic shifts. He describes changes in traditional jobs and community roles, such as the rural county extension agent moving from predominantly being an agricultural and farming advisor to serving as a consultant for non-farming residents about lawns and gardens and educating the community at large about pesticides. Though Wuthnow focuses on his own particular case examples, it is in such a compelling way that we cannot help but reflect on how those characteristics play out in the rural places we know.Research and SourcesThe core of information in Small-Town America is based on Wuthnow's own qualitative research data, which he has collected from interviews with 700 people in 300 towns in 43 states, including leaders and ordinary residents. He has compared these data to similar and related research in cities and suburbs. He primarily presents those data as case examples to illustrate the themes and trends on which he focuses in the book chapters. Wuthnow does not limit himself to presenting his own research, however. Rather, he undergirds his data and patterns of findings with a rich layer of diverse sources.Small-Town America includes quite a few national and regional statistics on rural communities, but they are wellcontextualized and palatable, rather than dry and abstract or tedious and disconnected. Wuthnow notes that while in recent years there has been an overall increase in research on rural places, this corpus is still insignificant compared to the explosion of urban-focused research published.Having acknowledged the rural research gap, Wuthnow provides various lenses for understanding the profiles of rural and small town where these interviews occurred, using data sources such as the National Center for Educational Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and multiple forms of U.S. Census data. He also provides theoretical grounding in anthropology, and in social and community theory, with contemporaries such as Sherry Ortner (2006) and more foundational authors like David Hummon (1990). …