A small world in Ontario. Application of a trialectic and relational model to the life of a Canadian community
Faced with the still vivid controversies between those who support the approach by the subject and those who support the approach by the structures, between those who think that action is at the center of sociology and those who are convinced that societal systems are the source of social dynamics, we can open up new way. In this article, I try to show that it is possible to break free of the actionist, structuralist as well as phenomenological approaches in order to better understand societal phenomena. To do this, I try to reintroduce a forgotten category, the event, as an important category of sociological research. But more importantly, I propose a relational model that studies not categories, but the relationships between categories. It does not do so as the models of the theory of networks by studying the «relations between», but by focusing on the hologrammatic character of societal systems, that is to say on the idea that individual, system and event are simply inseparable from one another. The model is based on the study of the links that unite the categories in a very intimate way. Each category is studied in relation to the other two and then in relation to the relationship between the other two. The empirical application shows that we can thus better understand the pathways or life histories of members of a small community in northeastern Ontario, their evolutions and even bifurcations in some cases, than with the actionists models or structuralists or with the combined action of this two approaches.