Why Canadian Forestry and Mining Towns Are Organized Differently: The Role of Staples in Shaping Community, Class, and Consciousness

This book fills a gap in the existing scholarship on single-industry towns by reviewing an extensive literature and using it to build a theoretical framework focusing simultaneously on the spheres of industry, work, and community in these towns. It does so by building ideal types of forestry and mining towns drawn from efforts pertaining to political economy, community studies, labor history, geography and anthropology. There exist numerous, and excellent, monographs of single-industry towns (SITs), but few - if any - systematic state-of-the-art efforts attempting to stop and think afresh in this well established field of study that seems to have lost much of its dynamism and visibility in the last thirty years or so. The core underlying argument of this work is that a reconsideration of some neglected staple insights constitutes a legitimate effort because it allows to focus on a lower level of analysis and to understand the complexity of working-class life in these distinct resource contexts. The framework stresses that forestry SITs could be depicted as having more of, an elite model power structure, separate work and community social arrangements, individualistic income strategies, as well as a lower class consciousness and numerous contradictory class locations; while mining SITs have more of: a class model power structure, overlapping work and community arrangements, income strategies framed in secondary relations terms, as well as a higher class consciousness and fewer contradictory class locations.