The Study of Rural Communities in Quebec: From the "folk society" Monographic Approach to the Recent Revival of Community as Place-based Rural Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The intellectual history of social sciences in Quebec reflects an in-depth community-focused monographic approach. This research model created a conception of rural Quebec as a collection of communities best described as folk societies. It also reinforced a social and scientific representation of rural Quebec as traditional, backwards and conservative. This intellectual history culminated in the work of Horace Miner, a student of the well known American anthropologist Robert Redfield. In Miner’s 1939 thesis Saint-Denis : A French-Canadian Parish, the community of Saint-Denis is presented as a prime example of a folk society. A few years later, Everett C. Hugues, also from the Chicago school of thought, came to Quebec to study French Canada in transition. He completed an influential community study of the small booming town of Drummondville in the Eastern Townships. In the 1950s, an indigenous social science took the lead in community studies, and created a conceptual model that portrayed rural communities as an expression of tradition. Since the Chicago school’s evolutionary paradigm conceived each society as moving from a traditional to a modern stage, rural societies would have no place within modern societies. This theoretical and conceptual incapacity to accept rurality in the modern or post-modern era is questionable, demonstrating the limits of this scientific paradigm to foster a greater understanding of rural social realities. Nonetheless, more optimistically, a new generation of Quebec rural historians are currently refashioning a different representation of the same rural Quebec. Instead of presenting these communities as conservative and static, they are now being portrayed as more open, adaptive, and creative, with a high level of individual migration. Communities are also shown to be proactive as they attempt to establish innovative institutional arrangements in the face of their specific economic and ecological opportunities and constraints.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".