Rural-to-urban transition and the division of labor: evidence from Saudi Arabia

Ecological theory proposes that the evolution of societies from rural-based to urban-based forms of organization occurs as cities coordinate a widening territorial division of labor. This research assesses the efficacy of this model in Saudi Arabia and represents a crucial test of the generalizability of ecological theory. The rural-to-urban transition in that country did not proceed, as it did in much of the rest of the world, in the context of a substantial extraction of surplus from the agrarian sector and difficulties in absorbing displaced agricultural labor by the industrial sector. Despite this, and other rather extraordinary departures from typical patterns, the strong association between urbanization and the division of labor predicted by ecological theory emerges