Colectivizarea. O perspectivă duală: calitativ și cantitativ
Collectivization. A dual perspective: qualitative and quantitative

Summary/Abstract: The issue of the study on the collectivized rural life in Romania brought to the fore numerous topics that can be framed interdisciplinary (history, sociology, political studies and economic studies). Discussions related to this have been a central point of debate in the academic world. Our discussion will be based upon the research of Howard Bekker, Pierre Paille, Max Webber, Pierre Bourdieu, Alex Mucchielli and we will gather all their work around one methodological matter: how the qualitative research may be relevant for the description of the collectivized rural life in Romania. Thus, we will follow several major themes: the dissolution of the Romanian traditional village, the end of peasantry, the emergence of the new values imposed by the communist regime in that period, the widening gap between the urban and rural world and the symbolic representations of work and property in the rural world. This study begins with the idea that the 1970s and 1980s did not allow for a reductionist research, based only on a “game of numbers” and an analysis of local rural documents, but required a much more complex analysis. In other words, qualitative research methods must complement the quantitative ones in order to address the subject from a subtler perspective. The focal point of our research is the property. This concept played a key role in the reconstruction of the mechanisms of “social articulation” at the time, which created new phenomena and subjects like the role of land ownership in the mentality of the collectivized rural world.

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