Sociology and Space, No. 15, 1967.
Review article
One Typological Method of Studying Rural Societies
Marcell Jolivet
Abstract
This text represents the first part of the article published in the »Revue
frangaise de sociologie«, special issue in 1965. It considers different typological
classification of rural societies. Usually one starts from the continuum which
extremes are the two confronted types. In literature there are numerous exemples
of such dichotomies. But the typological method established on the principle of
continuum leads to the greate simplifacion of reality and does not care for the
varieties which characterise rural communities. The aim of typology presented bv
the author is just in the discovery of peculiar dimensions that show differencies
among rural societies. Without being hypothesis per se, the type helps the
construction of hypothesis, it is a scheme, guide for the analysis and the description
of the studied phenomenon. This approach rejects the idea of searching a unique
continuum at which all societies could be placed. It is necessary to emphasize that
every one of them has pecularities incompatible with the common order. As a
matter of fact one tries to find out in this way significant differencies among
rural societies. For the construction of such explicative types one uses the rules
of the logical construction and opservation in the context of the particular rural
societies which have their history, in which changes take place under the influence
of the global society but with different intensity and forms.
As units of analysis in France cantons have been selected. There is the most
complete statistics about them. This enabled the elaboration of the Atlas of rural
France. Several monographs on communes have questioned the cantonal hypothesis, so that the typological procedure was twice initiated in different circumstances.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
118559
URI
Publication date:
20.3.1967.
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