Transactions (Social and Democratic)

Abstract

This entry discusses social transactions as modes of “conflictual cooperation” resulting in hybrid products along time sequences where successive adjustments between social groups and actors take place. They relate to conflicts of interests and values, which are especially difficult to resolve (conflicts between tradition and modernity, identity and alterity, etc.). In this sense, transactions are also a matrix for action, as in representative democracy. Here bipolar transactions between elected representatives and technicians play a structuring role in the daily decision-making process and cannot be separated from calls for reassessing the citizens’ role by having them participate, resulting in tripolar transactions. From a prospective point of view, the production of compromise is a central concern regarding the pressing calls for sustainability. Mobilizing social transactions is a way to approach possible hybridizations in the absence of a single overarching principle of legitimacy and depending on the relative (political, technical, social, economic) capacities of the different actors.