Social scientists have a long history of concern with the effects of industrialized farming on communities. Recently, the topic has taken on new importance as corporate farming laws in a number of states are challenged by agribusiness interests. Defense of these laws often requires evidence from social science research that industrialized farming poses risks to communities. A problem is that no recent journal articles or books systematically assess the extent to which research to date provides evidence of these risks. This article addresses the gap in the literature. We evaluate studies investigating the effects of industrialized farming on community well-being from the 1930s to the present. Using a pool of 51 studies, we document the research designs employed, evaluate results as to whether adverse consequences were found, and delineate the aspects of community life that may be affected by industrialized farming. Of these studies, 57% found largely detrimental impacts, 25% were mixed, finding some detrimental impacts, and 18% found no detrimental impacts. Adverse impacts were found across an array of indicators measuring socioeconomic conditions, community social fabric, and environmental conditions. Few positive effects of industrialized farming were found across studies. The results demonstrate that public concern about industrialized farms is warranted. Scholars often debate whether research should be oriented around disciplinesÕ accumulated body of knowledge or, conversely, provide critical knowledge in the public interest. Social scientistsÕ long-term engagement in building the body of research on industrialized farming allows for accomplishment of both objectives.

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This paper contrasts rural underemployment as a social fact with rural underemployment as a socially constructed reality. Using both survey data and in‐depth interviews with persistently underemployed rural residents, we were able to determine whether we were imposing our definition of reality on the interviewees. The data from the interviews largely demonstrated a correspondence between our objective definition of reality as defined by measures of underemployment and the informants' subjective interpretation of their employment situation. This procedure demonstrated that the underemployed had created their own subjective reality, which had become an objective reality: a socially created fact. A few cases, however, raised concerns about the extent to which that reality was widely shared because the interviewees' definitions did not correspond to our objective definitions or did not make sense in their own situations. Other interviewees' comments raised significant questions about the applicability of formal labor market concepts and measures, which tend to overlook the unique characteristics of rural labor markets such as uncompensated labor, self‐employment, and multiple job holding. Thus the indepth interviews provided conceptual checks on the extent to which we can impose our definitions of the situation on respondents' subjective reality.