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This article discusses the main trajectories of class analysis that have been published by the Canadian Review of Sociology ( CRS) over its first five decades, including research on class structure, the capitalist class, and the working class. Since the 1960s, three major intellectual challenges-(1) feminist/antiracist, (2) poststructuralist, and (3) individualization-have reoriented and fragmented the subdiscipline of class analysis. The article concludes by assessing the extent to which each of these intellectual challenges has impacted the streams of class analysis published in the CRS, and offers three thoughts on future directions for class analysis in Canadian sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, through the theoretical lens of life-course research and reproduction theory, we employ 15 years of longitudinal data from the British Columbia, Canada Paths on Life's Way project to examine the extent to which educational and career pathways of this cohort of 1988 high school graduates are gendered, individualized, prolonged, diversified; to determine marriage and parenthood patterns in relation to educational and occupational participation and outcomes across time; and to assess the extent to which social class still matters. We employ a transition probabilities analysis to follow the journeys of over 730 individuals from high school through the post-secondary system and work by identifying a sequence of significant stages. We then correlate these transition rates with relevant factors that influenced respondents' lives. We demonstrate quantitatively that although the life courses of young women and men are experienced differently, there is an overall regularity in outcomes. Their 'choices' at key transition points are to large extent shaped by external structures and social class and gender differences are evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on a research program that has mapped transitions in the Canadian corporate elite and has more recently investigated the formation of a transnational capitalist class. The program has focussed on the social organization of corporate power in both its accumulative and hegemonic aspects, as traced by the network of interlocking directorates among the largest firms. Recent developments in Canada exemplify transitions that seem integral to the financialized form of accumulation and the "market-driven politics" that characterize neo-liberal capitalism. Globally, network analysis shows the transnational capitalist class to he only nascent, despite the social organization provided by transnational interlocks and global policy-planning groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS SPECULATIVE ESSAY presents a preliminary statement on the paradoxical character of 19th-century class formation in the two white settler dominions of Canada and Australia. Outposts of empire, these social formations were early regarded with disdain, the one a classic mercantilist harvester of fish, fur, and wood, the other a dumping ground for convicts. By the mid-to-late 19th-century, however, Canada and Australia were the richest of colonies. Within their distinctive cultures and political economies, both supposedly dominated by staples, emerged working classes that were simultaneously combatative and accommodated. By the 1880s impressive organizational gains had been registered by labour in both countries, but the achievements of class were conditioned by particular relations of fragmentation, including those of 'race' and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on recent articles in the field of public opinion. In order to facilitate orientation to the reader, reviews are grouped according to categories politics, elections and social values, public opinion on current issues, public opinion theory, methodology of public opinion polling, polls as a social and political factor, mass media and public opinion. Some of the articles are as follows. "Political Parties, Public Opinion and State Policy in the United States," by Robert S. Erikson, Gerald C. Wright and John P. McIver published in the "American Political Science Review." State opinions in different states of the U.S. influence the ideological position of state parties. Parties' responsiveness to state opinion helps to determine their electoral success. "Class and Region in Canadian Voting: A Dependency Interpretation," by Elisabeth Gidengil published in "Canadian Journal of Political Science" states that while class clearly had an impact on voting behavior in Canada, the magnitude of that impact depended on the region people were living in. It was larger in the central, industrialized regions, smaller in the peripheral, urban regions.