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The article presents a comment on a previous article that appeared in a previous issue of the Canadian Journal of Sociology. According to the author, the central points of his article were: (a) that an extensive body of ignored research had shown that the methodologies adopted by the original Vertical Mosaic school of thought on elites probably exaggerated the exclusivity of Canadian elites to a considerable degree; (b) that the finding of elite membership that was unrepresentative of the social composition of the population did not indicate a shocking anomaly that demanded immediate remedy. This pattern is referred to in the international literature as the law of increasing disproportion; (c) that, in any case, research conducted using other methodologies, and research conducted since the original publication of The Vertical Mosaic, indicates that the Canadian pattern is in transition. Sociologist Harvey Rich argues that the measures of middle class used in the Vertical Mosaic tradition, and uncritically adopted in author's paper, are far too narrow and would apply to what most would designate as the upper middle class. Consequently, Rich argues that author's guesstimate about the possible proportion of those of working-class origins in the elites was too high. Rich is correct. It is also correct to suggest that author's paper sometimes confused sociologist Wallace Clement's position with sociologist John Porter's position and that its discussion suffered accordingly.

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Socioeconomic status scales have been central to the status-attainment approach to the study of stratification, an approach that became dominant in the United States and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. In this literature, qualitative distinctions among occupations are replaced by a quantitative measure of their status or prestige. Researchers working within the status-attainment tradition often refer to socioeconomic status simply as occupation. This shorthand is revealing in that it captures the central claim of the status-attainment literature: that what is important about occupations for the study of social differentiation is their status or prestige. The purpose of this paper is to show that the conceptualization and measurement of occupational status do not bring into focus the structured inequality between women and men in the workforce. It is believed that this shortcoming is unsurprising in view of the failure of the Weberian and functionalist traditions to treat gender inequality as central to the study of stratification.

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author describes the role that high school theater played on his identity formation as a sociologist. Many details are given concerning the impact of the ethnic and social stratification of St. John, New Brunswick in the 1950s and 1960s. The author describes his isolation and the importance of Yiddish culture to his family. The importance of the author's role as "Tony" in the musical "West Side Story" is highlighted, along with the acknowledgement that a role a person plays is sometimes valued more highly than an authentic self.

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The entry of large numbers of women into the paid labor force is one of the most dramatic social changes in twentieth-century Canada. Sociologists have therefore been keen to study the impact of women's increased labor force participation on the class structure, family life, political affairs, the educational system, and so forth. Neo-conservatives and feminists have increased the salience of issues surrounding women's "proper" role in society, and the distribution of attitudes towards those issues is therefore important in its own right. This article sets out to help answer the questions raised above by analyzing data from the 1988 Canadian National Election Study. The regression analysis suggests that more Canadians will come to favor women pursuing careers to the degree that younger, better-educated, and more secularized members of the population with pro-career orientations replace older, less well-educated, and more religious members of the population with pro-home orientations. In addition, career-orientations will strengthen to the degree that Canadians are prepared to invest in public daycare facilities and to the degree that men are prepared to undertake domestic work, thereby helping to relieve most women of the double burden of work in the labor force and at home.

The article argues that in spite of the common assumption that decision makers will systematically favour the interests of the social classes from which they emerge, elite policy positions are primarily a function of the values and interests they represent as elites. Although the analysis confirms a bias in the membership of Canadian elites favouring dominant social groups and classes, this bias largely fails to account for the contours of elite debate over policies of welfare state retrenchment. It uses data from a 1977 survey of 600 senior decision-makers in Canadian government, business, and labour to investigate the relationship between the social background characteristics of elites and their responses to social policy issues. The article concludes that elite politics should not be conceived primarily as a function of the personal characteristics of decision makers and therefore, that substituting individuals with different social backgrounds within existing institutional arrangements and power relationships should not be expected to substantially change the nature of elite politics in Canada.

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Descriptive accounts of working class consciousness ultimately obtain warrant from the strength of explanations that underline them. This article examines the explanation which asserts that working class consciousness is fragmented because of internal structure differentiation according to gender, ethnicity, religion, region and skill. The conclusion is that this explanation finds little support from an examination of evidence concerning the political attitudes of the contemporary Canadian working class. Regional differentiation is the only structural basis that affects a modest impact. The implication of this is that students of collective action should move beyond purely internal examinations to consider the impact of class relations and political strengths.

In the article, the author focuses on a recent review of the book "The Superbureaucrats," by C. Campbell and G. Szablowski in 1980 issue of this journal by Lorna Marsden. Marsden was impressed by the findings of Campbell and Szablowski to the effect that this elite is minimally accountable to the Canadian public and her review quite naturally emphasized that point. However, she hardly mentioned what, according to the author, was an even more interesting finding. The significant finding to which the author is referring to is the social origins of their "superbureaucrats," which were highly representative of the Canadian population. Furthermore, their data indicated that recruitment to this elite was remarkably open. Indeed, their interview data shows that there has been a substantial amount of mobility into this elite from working class origins. The author beleives that given the importance attributed to elite social origins and recruitment in the powerfully influential tradition in Canadian sociology, these findings should be of interest to sociologists in Canada generally.

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The standard method of estimating the rate of voting on the basis of social class has been to cross-tabulate the social class position of the respondents with the social class position of the political parties and to measure the strength of the association. This article reports on the political distinctiveness of class voting in Canada in 1965 using three different measures. The first is the conventional one. The others utilize party image variables. The study hopes that this discussion will help illuminate the Canadian case whilst illustrating use of a new measure. It gives us some additional insight into the nature of voter perception and motivation. In particular, it may give us a tool for the assessment of "the extent to which voters make the link between their interests and the party which supports these interests." It is felt that further research with comparable data from other countries is needed before any great confidence can be placed in the tentative interpretations of the Canadian case, which has been presented here.

The article is the author's response to Peter R. Sinclair's comments on author's literary work. Sinclair makes some minor points with which the author disagrees, although his main point strikes me as sound: a new interpretation of Social Credit is needed. He also outlines some strategies for further research which are believed to be valuable. Sinclair states that the author has challenged the conventional view of Alberta's class structure and the distribution of Social Credit votes by reviewing what is now known about these issues, implying that the author had access to some relatively new materials not available to earlier researchers. The author states that election results used were available in 1935, the census materials in 1936. No new materials of this kind have become available, although the existing ones have appeared in different publications over the years. He also states that his assertion that Social Credit received disproportionate support from the petite bourgeoisie was based on higher rates of voting for Social Credit in small towns and rural areas. The author has shown that in 1935 only 11 of 27 small towns had a Social Credit vote that exceeded the provincial average.