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Elite studies in general, and elite social characteristics in particular, used to be a focus of intense interest in Canadian Sociology. The interest in elite social characteristics has since declined, apparently in part because it is believed that the topic is of no substantive significance. Nonetheless, a considerable body of research in Political Science and Women's Studies over the past two decades has shown that social characteristics such as gender, race, and sexual orientation have a meaningful impact on the decisions made by those in authority positions. This paper calls for renewed study of elite social characteristics in Canadian Sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, the notion that "everything has changed" became a common theme. This paper argues that one of the most important areas of change occurred in the practice of surveillance. Utilizing news articles from the New York Times and Toronto Globe and Mail, we analyze the politics and social dynamics of contemporary surveillance. Our analysis is not a study of terrorism and September 11th per se, but rather uses the political reaction to September 11th to ground an examination of how surveillance policies and practices can paradoxically bring with them both an increased sense of security and a host of new dangers. We detail how September 11th provided a convenient opportunity for the security establishment to lobby for increased surveillance capacity, despite lingering questions about whether such devices can achieve their professed goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this ethnographic comparative study of the Jeux de l'Acadie, the Jeux franco-ontariens and the Alberta Francophone Games is to explore further how minority youth identities are produced and manifested in Canada's francophonies. Through interviews, drawings and questionnaires adolescents express and give meaning to their francophoneness in the context of the Games. The analysis reveals that francophone identities are reproduced as a component of hybrid identities. This hybridity refers to youths' integration of once distinct francophone and anglophone cultural identities into a "hybrid" identity. This paper examines the different configurations of these hybrid cultural and linguistic identities, where some youths spontaneously and mostly live in French but insist on their hybridity, while other youths perform predominantly as anglophones but remain attached to their francophoneness. Indeed, Acadian youths primarily perform a singular francophone identity while Franco-Ontarian and Alberta francophone youths manifest a rather complex and asymmetrical mélange of francophoneness and anglophoneness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various forms of private education are growing in Canada. This paper explores one instance of this change, private tutoring. Data from Ontario show that this massively growing industry is expanding its reach, as exemplified by the evolution from "shadow education" provision into "learning centre" franchises. Traditional shadow educators closely follow the school curriculum, offering short-term homework help and test prep. Learning centres develop their own curricular and assessment tools, offer comprehensive menus of services, and aim to nurture long-term skills. In so doing, these businesses are becoming increasingly "school-like," moving beyond supplementary education towards a fuller alternative to public schooling. We link this evolution to the imperatives of the franchise form. Their larger investment prompts franchises to control their services via standardization, to secure stable revenues, and to seek new market niches. In conclusion we discuss the prospects for tutoring and other forms of private education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to bridge the dichotomy of "historical truth" and personal recollection by exploring the sociological concept of memory. Drawing on 30 oral testimonies of Nisei (second generation) Japanese Canadian women, I explore the diverse and often complex ways in which Nisei women remember the internment, with particular attention to the intermingling of past and present, the relationship between teller and listener, as well as the layering of personal and public narratives, in the construction of these memories. The theme of silence and telling is also explored, with the understanding that the literacization of memories is always a political act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research indicates that immigrant women of various socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds have been instrumental, in past and at present, in community organizing, including involvement and leadership in the social construction of ethnic community institutions, in order to overcome barriers of participation and to improve their lives, and those of others in society. This article conceptualizes immigrant women's organizing in order to achieve change in their lives and/or in the lives of others as community (social) development. It is argued that immigrant women have made important and largely overlooked contributions to community development in Canada. More specifically, the paper analyses immigrant women's contributions to community development by drawing upon data from the Maritime region of Canada. It analyses the empirical research data that explore 1. how immigrant women are involved in various types of organizations in the urban structures of the Maritimes; and 2. from their own perspective why immigrant women are involved in organizing.

Unions may be viewed as a central institution of capitalist democracies. This paper updates aspects of Potter's work on labour and the labour elite in Canada(1965: Ch. 10-11). Conventional measures indicate that the power of the labour movement in Canada increased after Potter studied it around 1960 but that it has subsequently declined. Support from ideological and state elites seems to have followed a similar rise and decline pattern. Foreign influence has been considerably reduced. The movement remains highly decentralized. In contrast to the situation in 1960, unions are now notably female, white collar and public sector. A partial study of the social characteristics of the labour elite indicates that its ethnic origins have become less British and more French Canadian. The "other ethnic" proportion of the elite has been stable. Virtually no visible minority representation was detected. Given changes in the ethno-racial composition of the population, it would appear that under-representation of the non Charter Group categories has increased significantly over the past four decades. Conversely, female representation in the elite has grown substantially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the anxieties which crystallized in the summer of 2000 concerning the uses and abuses of ecstasy at local raves in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Despite the fact that concerted efforts were made on the part of a host of "moral entrepreneurs" to extinguish raves held on city-owned property, Toronto's rave communities were able to subvert the moralizing discourse designed to characterize them "at risk," simultaneously manipulating the same discursive technique to amplify the risks associated with terminating "legal" raves in the city of Toronto. Conceptually situated in the sociology of moral regulation, the analysis explicates the fluid character of media discourses and the dynamic interplay of social agents in the social construction, and subversion, of moral panic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of sociology as a discipline in Canada is intimately related to its institutional position within Canadian universities. As student bodies expanded, not only did the demand for university-based sociologists increase but there was also a demand for society-specific class material for sociology courses. This paper examines the textbook, particularly in the 1970's, as a symbol of changes and developments in the discipline and demonstrates its role in synthesis-building, community-building, and nation-building in anglo-Canadian sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canadian sociology has contributed to and been transformed by the "new" Canadian political economy tradition emerging in the early 1970s. The macrosociological tradition within Canadian sociology readily melded into this new scholarship. This paper reflects upon these mutual influences and ponders the prognosis for sociology's viability in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the life histories of ten anglophone Canadian pioneer women sociologists: Helen Abell, Grace Anderson, Jean Burnet, Eleanor Cebotarev, Kathleen Hennan, Helen McGill Hughes, Thelma McCormack, Helen Ralston, Aileen Ross and Dorothy Smith. All were born before 1930, encountered significant sexism, and found jobs very easily. This pattern is placed into the context of a politics of gender and a politics of knowledge. Politics of gender in the institutional context and in family rules resulted in disadvantages, while the effect of the women's movement led to solidarity among women sociologists and eventual improvements in their situation. The simultaneous emergence of the women's movement and the Canadianization movement led to a politics of knowledge which proved advantageous for both. Nevertheless, the sociological canon so far has hot included women pioneers -- the author needed to conduct interviews since almost no published information existed about most of these important sociologists prior to this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the distribution of males and females of British, French and "other" ethnic origins among sociology and anthropology professors from 1971 to 1996. The results suggest that there has been a steady increase in the proportion of females compared to males, however, most of the increase has been experienced by women of British and French origins. The British and French females increased their representation both in terms of first time employment into the rank of assistant professor and with respect to promotion to higher ranks. In contrast, females of "other" ethnic origins were less likely to move into the university setting, but, once there, they were more likely to move up into higher ranks. In general, the study suggests that we should not view the category of "woman" as monolithic: British women are more privileged than French and "non-charter" women and men in the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Alberta Francophone Games (AFG), a yearly weekend-long sporting and cultural event, were instituted in 1992 to create an attractive space where young French speakers would produce themselves as "francophones." In the newspaper version of "Coach's Corner," hockey commentator Don Cherry has argued that it is "unfair" to allocate government funding to the AFG because participation is restricted to French speakers. In this article, we relate Cherry's comment not only to the discourses of francophone identity produced at the Alberta Francophone Games, but also to those that circulate in Canadian society in general, all of which generate competing "truths" that make the francophone subject discursively unstable. We offer an analysis of "francophone" performance at the intersection of the AFG's main identity discourses which play their small, but revealing, part in the overall Canadian production of uncertain "francophone" communities and identities. The paper also suggests that Canada's minority francophonies provide a rich ground for the development of discourse theory along the problematic of identity/difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past five years, public debate has increasingly centered on racial supremacists who use the internet for advertising and recruitment. Yet, to date, this phenomenon has attracted little sociological attention. As such, the present paper seeks to accommodate for this curious silence in the literature by drawing on data gathered from an investigation of the Freedom-Site, a racial supremacist Web site run out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In addition to updating the body of literature concerned with Canada's racial supremacists, three arguments are presented: first, there exists a considerable gap between the public images that racial supremacist groups attempt to present on the internet and a far less benign image that emerges upon closer analysis; second, exemplified by the Freedom-Site, the internet has facilitated a greater degree of solidarity between racial supremacist organizations; and third, given the impersonal nature of the internet, there exists a certain degree of danger that otherwise ordinary citizens will become more susceptible to the ideology of racial supremacism. These arguments are incorporated into an examination of why racial supremacist groups have appeared on the internet and what the implications of this presence are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on ethnic business and immigrant entrepreneurship has posed two major questions. First, why are some immigrant groups more inclined toward entrepreneurship and self-employment? Second, are those immigrants who engage in business better remunerated than salaried workers? These questions produce conflicting answers. On the one hand, blocked mobility in the open market is believed to be a key factor in driving immigrants to business and self-employment; on the other hand, research on immigrant enclaves suggests that immigrants are drawn into the enclave economy because of its comparable returns. Using the Longitudinal Immigration Data Base, this paper shows that returns of self-employment were lower than employment for immigrants who entered Canada between 1980-1995, and that the income gap between these groups increased over time. Nevertheless, an increasingly larger proportion of immigrants engaged in self-employment over time. These findings support the notion that new immigrants probably choose self-employment to overcome employment obstacles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an empirical examination of Sampson and Laub's social control theory. It tests the effects of family structure, family attachment, school attachment and peer attachment on a generalized form of risk-taking behaviour which includes delinquency and drug use. The data come from a single stratified sample of 1,075 high school students in Ontario. The findings suggest that the effect of family attachment on risk-taking is moderated by both school and peer involvement. When family attachment is tow, school attachment inhibits risk-taking and strong peer attachment reinforces it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's comments on the paper Canada's Impossible Science: Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis in Anglo-Canadian Sociology. Do grand visions and preoccupations with how we ought to be doing our work have a place in the contemporary world of Anglo-Canadian sociology or should we avert our gaze from the flood of imperatives that we are implored to take seriously and just get on with it? Get on with the teaching? Get on with the scramble for resources and recognition? Get on with the construction of our world, the consensual observations that once on the page are us, the texts of sociology? Recognition and reputation do flow from publication and engaged teaching. That much we know or should know. So why not just do it and, thereby, perhaps, banish or, at least, reduce the innervating gloom of collective self-doubt that seems to be so much with us these days? So why not stop wringing our hands about our journals and simply fill their pages with worthy observations? So why not stop complaining about the quality of our meetings and take up the challenge of finding there those who can understand our specialized ways of talking and writing? McLaughlin provides us with plenty of reasons why not,

An introduction is presented to this special issue of the journal that features the article "The Institutionalization of Symbolic Interactionism in Canadian Sociology, 1922-1979: Success at What Cost?" by Richard Helmes-Hayes and Emily Milne and includes responses to that paper.