SMALL-TOWN MERCHANT STRATEGIES OF SURVIVAL (ETHNOGRAPHY, RURAL, SCHOOLS, REGIONAL)

The study examines rural merchant strategies of survival within the context of two small-town farm communities, one declining in population and one growing. Comparisons are made with respect to the adaptive problems, solutions, and strategic factors identified by merchant actors in the two communities. These comparisons are cast into a regional-historical context which reveals regional processes of school consolidation to have been a major factor in leading to a socio-economic differentiation between the two communities and, correspondingly, differences in merchant strategies of survival. Distribution impacts on local merchant economy and cultural life of the regional school consolidation process are examined. Population migration, the breakdown of merchant economy and the unraveling of local cultural life was a pattern observed in hinterland areas. Merchants in the declining community are found to manifest strategies characterized by attempts to control the strategic factor of interdependence between members of the community. Members of the growing community are found to exhibit strategies for integrating new elements in the community. The entrepreneurial role of merchants in both towns was observed to be heavily influenced by social constraints of the small community. The study is exploratory in nature and argues for a greater use of regional and ethnographic perspectives in the study of rural Amercian society