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Chapter 5 The Contingent Creation of Rural Interest Groups Miriam J. Wells Late twentieth century changes in u.s. agriculture have reconfigured the interests of rural people. The intensity of public debate and the range of policy claims surrounding them are unparalleled. Concerns range from the use of land, public water, and hazardous chemicals, and the relations between the u.s. and its trading partners, to protections for farm laborers and the physical environment. In all of these controversies, the processes through which individuals and groups come to be formed as social actors-and how these processes influence the problems that are addressed, the ways that issues are defined, and how production systems further change-are of crucial import. Policy analysts and social movements scholars often take the interests of social groups as given or constant, leaving the process of interest group formation outside the realm of critical inquiry.l This exclusion makes policy formation appear to be relatively straightforward-a simple reflection of the balance of interests that exist. It leads, moreover , to a vision of policy formation and political-economic change that is relatively static, in that it omits crucial sources of indeterminacy and transformation. This chapter explores the processes of interest identification and interest group formation generated by the restructuring of U.S. agriculture. It argues that patterns of rural politics are highly unpredictable and have become more so over the course of recent decades. The analysis deals with a certain set of rural actors and period of time: harvest workers in California's central coast strawberry industry in the late twentieth century. It aims to identify some of the difficulties inherent in predicting the character of rural interest groups and to specify some of the key determinants and consequences of their formation. Contingent Creation of Rural Interest Groups 97 The data on which this chapter is based are drawn from a long-term study of California's central coast strawberry industry (Wells 1996),2 an industry that underwent significant swings in economic structure in the last several decades of the twentieth century. Most important for the present analysis, after the mid-1960s and persisting into the mid1980s the industry shifted from an employment structure in which direct-hire employees brought in the harvest, to one in which over half of harvest workers were sharecroppers, defined as independent contractors under the law. This economic restructuring altered the relationship of harvest workers to the production process and to the law. It also heightened ambiguity as to where workers' interests lay and created new consequences for alternative representations. In this context , social intermediaries-here public interest lawyers, nonprofit organizations , and union leaders and organizers-played key roles in shaping group interests and forming interest groups. The following analysis will (1) identify three key influences on contemporary interest group formation which make its processes and outcomes especially fluid and indeterminate; (2) show how the restructuring of the California strawberry industry increased the complexity and ambiguity of harvest workers' interests and introduced new constraints on their group formation; and (3) examine two episodes ofinterest identification and group mobilization, to illustrate the contingent character of rural interest group formation. The Determination of Interests and Interest Groups Any discussion ofinterest groups must begin by acknowledging the distinction that sociological patriarchs Max Weber and Karl Marx found so important: that between objective interests-the way circumstances actually impact an individual or group, the things that an objective observer would say are "in their interest"-and subjective interests-the interests that are explicitly affirmed by that individual or group, the things that participants are actually "interested in." The former notion of interests identifies a set of people in a similar objective plight. The latter notion identifies a set of people who perceive themselves to be part of a collective "we" and may choose to act on this perception. On the face of it, the process of interest identification and interest group formation could be one of an individual's simply recognizing "what is" and joining with others in comparable objective situations. In fact, however, the process is neither as straightforward nor as individual as this characterization implies. Three factors introduce particular volatility and indeterminacy into contemporary interest group 98 Miriam J. Wells formation: the increasingly diverse pulls of socioeconomic status, the changing constraints of institutional structure, and the intervention of social intermediaries. The Multiple and Ambiguous Pulls of Socioeconomic Status An individual or group's position in society is often taken to be the primary...

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