From Liberal Arts to Disintegrated Disciplines? The Canada Research Chairs Program and Anglo-Canadian Social Science.

The Canada Research Chairs (CRC) Program is a $900 Million 21st Century initiative that endows 2,000 chairs in an attempt to make Canadian universities and research internationally competitive. This paper analyzes how the program has been implemented in the social sciences in its five-year history and some of its consequences. Informed by work in the sociology of science and professions, it emphasizes the importance of control of professional and scholarly standards for the empowerment of academic disciplines and its practitioners vis a vis the differing interests and foci of university administrators and bureaucrats, who are often given considerable influence over choosing which academics to endow. As an empirical test of professional control and cohesion, the entire population of CRCs in economics, political science and sociology are compared to random samples of non-CRCs in their respective disciplines. Logistic regression analyses suggest that CRCs as a group in all three disciplines (especially economics) publish and are cited more in core journals at significant level than the random sample of non-CRC. However, restricting the non-CRC sample to research universities diminishes coefficients, and renders some differences non-significant. More importantly, by removing a small proportion of 'stars' - roughly the top decile of CRC's in sociology, the top two deciles in political science, and the top thirty-five percent in economics - any differences between the publishing records of the CRCs and the non-CRC sample are rendered insignificant. Implications for public policy and the future prospects of the social sciences in Canada are then discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]