ABSTRACT
Since the 1920s, there has been a succession of reports dealing with the youths of America. Although the majority of these reports have dealt with youth generally, the special case of rural youth has not gone unnoticed. Rural sociologists have long been interested in studying career orientations of young people, a direct outgrowth of the long-standing fact that large numbers of rural youths leave rural areas for urban ones. Several presidents of the Rural Sociological Society, including William Sewell, Archibald Haller, Lee Coleman, Walter Slocum, Harry Schwarzweller, and Robert Bealer, have conducted considerable research on this topic. Unlike human capital and status attainment researchers, labor market segmentation and class researchers are more explicitly concerned with the form of the economy, i.e., capitalism per se. Segmented labor market and class researchers argue that contemporary capitalism has entered an era of monopoly capital. Labor market segmentation theorists hold that the labor market is divided along industrial and occupational dimensions.
