INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES IN RURAL LIFE
Authors: BENVENUTI BRUNO 
Published: March 2008

Institutional Changes in Rural Life

In dealing with institutional problems, particularly when referring to rural development, the sociologist should not avoid value‐judgements. With increasing institutional specialization and growth, an increase occurs in individual and collective social action of an intentional character. This intentionality calls for an explicitation of the values underlying the action. Sociology today is unable to meet this problem because of its ‘ethical agnostic’ approach.

In choosing an explicitly non‐ethical‐agnostic approach, the societal trend towards emancipation or freedom is elected as a guideline for sociological analysis. Freedom is provisionally defined as: opportunity or possibility to consciously exercise control on one's own future. With some examples it is shown that rural sociological research at present does not acquire meaningful information about the interplay between individual and institutional intentional action which brings about socio‐economic development.

A continuum of rigidity for the overall societal institutional context, as being the specifically institutional counterpart of the traditional‐modern continuum, is hypothesized as a tentative framework for discussing institutional changes. In order to show the validity of the hypothesis, two polar cases for the degree of rigidity in the overall institutional context, present within the same large class of fairly developed societies, Sweden and Italy, are compared. The illustration is tentative, because the author has had to resort to non‐sociological documentation. The conclusion is that the major differences between the two institutional contexts will be functionally related mainly with the type of institutional education and with the degree of authoritarian and autocratic thinking in either case.

Passing on to examine a few recent institutional developments, it is stated that their importance for the development of the countryside can only be evaluated if the possibilities for change in collateral institutional fields are also taken into consideration.

In the countryside, a process of formalization of functions into new institutions is to be noticed, but the process is not likely to have an equal intensity all over Europe. The continuum of institutional rigidity can help to explain several apparent contradictions in this field which have not so far been cleared by sociological research.

Similarly, although educational standards are rising in the countryside everywhere, this is no yardstick for measuring educational development: the place of the society on the continuum should be taken into account.

Finally, some overall institutional trends in developed countries are reviewed: the increase in autonomous forces, a shift of political power from the local to national (or ‘higher’) levels; the increasing importance of economic profitability in institutional development; the trends towards the forming of ‘two‐layer’‐societies; the forming of an image of society as a ‘firm‐like’ organization.

All through the discussion of these various points comments are made on the shortcomings in sociological research.

In the conclusion some major contradictions in the ideology of a value‐free exercise of sociological research are briefly analyzed. Instead of taking the position of an uninvolved technician or judge of other people's doings, the sociologist should work on the basis of a professional ethic, whereby major tasks would be found in the study and discovery of social phenomena in as far as these are disfunctional for social emancipation or freedom.