A Small Town in Modern Times: Alexandria, Ontario

Eileen Goltz is Public Documents Librarian at Laurentian University.

A walk down Main Street, and an introduction to six townspeople,
welcomes the reader to the town of Alexandria in Glengarry County,
Ontario. Thus, Rayside, a University of Toronto political scientist,
introduces his scholarly study of the dynamics of a small town (with a
population of 3,245) in 1986, where both French and English and spoken.
This is a welcome and readable addition to the growing field of
community literature, and will be appreciated by social scientists and
others interested in community dynamics.

Rayside has studied everyday relationships and contrasted them with the
idealized image of the town as a warm, intimate place to live. He found
that townspeople had created self-images that ignored inequalities and
divisions based on social class, language, and gender. His thesis is
that inequality exists both within the town and between the town and
outside forces. He learned that, despite of an analytic tradition that
perceives community power to be held by a narrowly recruited elite,
there was no single cohesive elite in Alexandria. Power in the town was
fragmented, and was exercised by local people who had access to centres
of power outside the town.

The book is the result of Rayside’s intensive investigation of
relationships among political, economic, and social forces. He and his
research assistants interviewed nearly two hundred people, and those
interviews loom large in the book: excerpts provide the reader with a
sense of the community and an awareness of the people. The narrative is
topically organized and moves from industrial development and economic
dependence through wage labor, gender identity, inequality, language,
schooling, and community politics, ending with fragmentation and
community. Explanatory tables, endnotes, and a guide to further reading
will help the reader comprehend the concepts on which Rayside has built
his study and reached his conclusions.