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1 1 Introduction Princess Anne and Crisfield, Maryland, are both located in Somerset County, where the official motto is Semper Eadem—ever the same. And it is indeed surprising how little has changed there in the more than three hundred years that have passed since its founding.1 When it was established in 1666, Somerset was the poorest county on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. On the eve of the Civil War, it was one of the poorest in the state. The county spent virtually nothing for schools or for road maintenance then, nor did it make any public expenditures for the poor.2 After the Civil War, an economic renaissance occurred that was stimulated by the coming of the railroad, new farming technologies, and an oystering boom that reached its peak in the 1880s and continued for several decades thereafter . The prosperity during that period was extraordinary; unfortunately, it did not last. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Somerset has experienced population loss and economic decline. The Great Depression marked the beginning of a long and still continuing outmigration. By 1910, the county’s population had peaked at 26,455, where it remained fairly stable until the 1930s. During that decade, numerous farms and businesses were lost.3 Between 1940 and 1980, while the rest of Maryland experienced the fastest population growth in its history, Somerset County alone declined in population.4 In 1990, it had about 21,000 residents, with 1,666 living in Princess Anne and 2,880 in Crisfield.5 By 1986, Somerset had fallen behind even the poorest Appalachian counties in western Maryland and thus became the poorest county in the state. There was no movie theatre, no department store, no public transportation. The average income was less than eight thousand dollars. When I first ventured into Somerset County as a research assistant investigating the outcome of job generating activities there, I naturally assumed that in this poorest of all Maryland counties, the residents would 2 / Community, Culture, and Economic Development overwhelmingly favor growth.6 Moreover, because the study of small town and rural regimes had remained theoretically and empirically underdeveloped ,7 the ideology of growth boosterism that was continuously promulgated by economic development officials and chambers of commerce had become the conventional wisdom by default, even among scholars. Derived from nineteenth-century neoclassical economic theory, the dominant view in the 1980s was that growth is conducive to a community’s overall good. Promoting growth through top-down economic development strategies is politically popular too, because residents can see that their individual interests are tied to the level of commercial activity in their town.8 Elected officials were thus expected to pursue development for the sake of the public interest and to enhance their political standing as well. Persuaded by the simple, deductive logic of the market model, I too expected that the greater a community’s economic distress, the greater the popular sentiment in favor of development activities would be.9 And indeed, survey data indicate that most Somerset County residents favor economic growth.10 Readers might therefore share my surprise that my interviews with individuals in Princess Anne and Crisfield revealed a deep, pervasive ambivalence about economic development. What was going on? Even more baffling was the fact that, while both towns were experiencing similar levels of economic distress, their development policies differed markedly from each other. The theoretical impasse that I encountered in the course of that first research project was, in fact, entirely predictable, for Martin Staniland has shown that there is an intractable logical problem inherent in any explanation of development policy that is based upon general economic models.11 The problem can be briefly stated as follows: If one assumes that people in different communities are more or less equally rational, then what can account for the variety of policy responses in communities experiencing similar levels of economic distress? The market model, by itself, is inadequate to explain this variation, because, although it tells us that individuals seek to maximize their utility, it fails to explain how individuals acquire one set of preferences instead of another. There is a promising alternative to the market model, however, that is sometimes referred to as the “social embeddedness argument.” As Mark Granovetter explains it, “Actors do not behave or decide as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy. Their attempts at purposive...

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