Politics, Locality, and Economic Restructuring: California’s Central Coast Strawberry Industry in the Post–World War II Period

* An earlier version of this article was presented in the Winter 1998 Colloquium Series of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University. The research on which this article is based was funded by the Anthropology and Sociology Programs of the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of California, Davis.

Abstract

This article challenges overly economistic, static, and homogenizing representations of contemporary economic restructuring through an in-depth ethnographic case study of the central coast California strawberry industry in the post–World War II period. It demonstrates that restructuring is much more uneven in its incidence and complex in its motivation than usually portrayed, and that politics and human agency are at its core. Because of the place-based nature of certain economic activity and the grounded experience of political process, its explication requires a sensitivity to space and place.

• economic restructuring
• agriculture
• rural development
• the law/state
• class relations
• sharecropping
• contingent employment
• California

Notes

* An earlier version of this article was presented in the Winter 1998 Colloquium Series of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University. The research on which this article is based was funded by the Anthropology and Sociology Programs of the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of California, Davis.