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This contribution argues that Kathy Charmaz's career did not burst into full intellectual bloom until the last 25 years of her life – from 55 to her death at 80. I examine why and how this scholarly blossoming happened so late in her life and the nature of its many manifestations, especially research on a wide variety of social justice issues. After her initial focus on medical sociology, specializing in chronic illness, Kathy became an innovative and renowned qualitative methodologist, developing constructivist grounded theory (CGT) method taken up in many amazingly heterogeneous scholarly fields transnationally.

It has long been realized that market-based development tends to impact Third World rural communities by increasing stratification between those who are able to take advantage of increasing opportunities and those who are less fortunate (for instance, Kottak, 1999). An extreme example of this was the early impact of the Green Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. It more than tripled the productivity of rice in parts of Asia, but on the village level it often had a less benign effect on the wealth gap and the retention of assets by the very poor.¹ Less extreme cases are represented in this volume by Eric Jones and Ueli Hostettler. Both describe instances in which increasing contact with the outside was the main element impacting on rural communities rather than technological innovations in agriculture. They differ, however, in that Jones approaches the subject synchronically by using central place theory and network analysis, while Hostettler’s contribution is decidedly historical in character.