Half a century of sociological scholarship in the CRS(A).
Carroll, William K.
WITH THIS SPECIAL ISSUE, we mark half a century of sociological
scholarship in the pages of the official journal of the Canadian
Sociological Association (CSA). Like the Association, the Canadian
Review of Sociology (CRS) (1) has been a primary venue for the formation
and development of a community of sociologists in Canada. On its Web
site, the CSA conveys this project as follows: "the CSA is for
people who think Canada should be a nation-state separate from the
United States, a nation-state with a body of sociologists who both
participate in sociology at the North American and global level and who
give priority to the needs of Canadian society for the best sociological
analysis we can give." (2) Regardless of whether or not one accepts
these exact terms, Canadian sociology is a challenging project, given
* deeply rooted differences within Canadian society itself
(colonial/national, linguistic, regional), which subvert the claim to
community among Canadians, let alone Canadian sociologists;
* the pull exerted by an adjacent and much larger American
community of sociologists integrated (particularly in the 1940s to
1980s, arguably less so today) around a positivist core;
* the centripetal forces issuing from the rise of interdisciplines
(women's studies, labor studies, cultural studies, environmental
studies) and, most recently;
* emergence of global sociology, a project that, while not
unsympathetic to national sociological communities, encourages formation
of transnational publics, particularly within the International
Sociological Association.
The challenges of practicing "Canada's impossible
science" (McLaughlin 2005) are ongoing, and not entirely unwelcome.
They have pushed sociologists to develop knowledge that is not only
relevant to Canada and Canadians but that compares with the best
sociological work from other settings.
If the challenges are incontrovertible, so is the fragility of the
truths Canadian sociologists have been able to tease out of the flow of
social life in Canada and beyond its borders. In a volume that
commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Canadian Sociology and
Anthropology Association, Deborah Harrison, Raymond Currie, Linda
Christiansen-Ruffman, and I noted the fragility of sociological
truth--its historical, interpretative, contingent character; the
continuing process through which truth is appropriated, reconstructed
and woven into the social fabric as people make history; the fragility
of the social relations that are constitutive of disciplines and
societies. We suggested that "... precisely because its truths have
been so radically reconstructed, Canadian social science may be to some
degree in a unique position--more able to recognize the fragility of
sociological knowledge, and less prone to ethnocentrism and
universalistic pretensions," and motivated, at its best, "to
continually excavate further, in order to lay bare new layers" of
realities covered over by hegemonic narratives (Carroll et al.
1992:6,7). The contributions to this issue carry these sensibilities
forward, into the next half century of Canadian sociology, while
reflecting on the journey to date.
THE FIRST HALF CENTURY, A MINOR COMPENDIUM
Space in this Introduction does not allow a detailed retrospective
on the CRS(A)'s first 50 years, but perhaps a minor compendium will
provide some perspective. Reza Nakhaie's (2010) analysis of Google
Scholar citations is the latest in a string of studies on the impact of
articles published in Canadian sociological journals, which have at
times struck a pessimistic note on Canadian sociology's prospects
(cf., Baer 2005; Brym 2003; McLaughlin 2005). He found that although
impact levels for CRS(A) articles have been well below those published
in flagship American journals such as the American Sociological Review,
some CRS(A) articles have been highly cited; that the percentage of
CRS(A) articles never cited in the journal's first 45 years is
comparable to articles published in other sociological journals; and
that there is no difference of any magnitude in the impact of articles
published in the CRS(A) and those published in its direct comparator,
the Canadian Journal of Sociology (CJS). All this suggests that since
its foundation, the CRS(A) "has been effective in providing the
intellectual nourishment for critical and professional sociologists,
graduate students, policymakers, and a segment of the
public-at-large" (Nakhaie 2010:196). For present purposes, we can,
on the basis of some rudimentary tabulations, look into a few further
themes in the Review's first half century.
Editors
Since its founding in 1964, there have been 17 sociology editors of
the CRS(A) (see Table 1). (3) In the sociology of sociology, the role of
"invisible colleges," discerned on the basis of university
affiliations, citations, co-authorship and so on, has been a
longstanding topic of investigation (cf., Nock 1992; Varga 2011). Often,
particular departments have served as venues for these formations, as in
the Chicago school, centered at the University of Chicago, whose
influence in the early decades of the twentieth century reached across
the border, into Canada's first sociology department at McGill. At
the University of Toronto, S.D. Clark played a leading role as
practitioner and exponent of a historical sociology that combined the
political economy of his mentor Harold Innis with Chicago-school
influences from McGill (Nock 1983). Without reading too much into the
data, the institutional affiliation of CRS(A) editors indicates very
roughly the prominence of specific departments within the developing
Canadian sociological community.
Strikingly, in the Review's first quarter century, six of
eight sociology editors were based at either the University of Toronto
(Burnet, Breton, Brym--a total of nine years) or McMaster (Jones,
McDonald, TancredSheriff--a total of 10 years). Only in the 1970s and
early 1980s did sociologists outside the so-called "golden
horseshoe"--James McCrorie (University of Regina) and John Jackson
(Concordia)--serve editorial terms. It is likely that, given the
informal process of recruitment via a selection committee, social
networks comprising "invisible colleges" played a part in
constituting this Toronto-McMaster axis. Since 1989, when James Curtis
began a three-year term, sociology editors have held diverse
institutional affiliations. Moreover, editorial affiliations have spread
outward from central Canada. Indeed, beginning with Marlene Mackie in
1992, seven of eight (sociology) editors have been from western Canada
(Mackie, Sydie, Knutilla, Carroll, Matthews, Wilkes) or eastern Canada
(Porter), with only Reza Nakhaie claiming an institutional affiliation
in central Canada (though well outside the Toronto-Hamilton corridor).
(4) This dispersion after the 1980s may indicate in part the
coming-of-age of sociology departments throughout the country, but it
could also be related to a turning away, in certain central Canadian
departments, from the Canadian sociology community--a reorientation
toward what is perceived by some as a more professional sociology, based
particularly in the United States. I will return to this below.
The trend regarding gender also tells us something of interest.
Although a critical gender lens was not salient within sociological
analysis at the Review's inception, its first editor, Jean Burnet,
was a female sociologist prominent on the Biligualism and Biculturalism
Royal Commission, who went on to found the Sociology Department at York
University's Glendon College. Feminist sociologist Lynn McDonald
edited the Review on an interim basis in 1971 to 1972, but it was not
until 1982 that a woman editor with a feminist perspective, Peta
Tancred-Sheriff, served a full term. Since that time, if we include the
Review's newly appointed editor, six men and five women have served
as (sociology) editors. (5)
As for what Guy Rocher (1992) called "the two solitudes
between Canadian sociologists" (p. 65), the only CRS(A) editor from
a francophone university, Louis-Jacques Dorais, of Universite Laval,
served as anthropology editor from 1982 to 1985. Relatedly, English has
been the predominant language in the Review from its inception forward.
The secular trend in numbers of French-language and English-language
articles (Figure 1) shows that, notwithstanding a few spikes in
French-language contributions (in 1978 coinciding with a special issue
on Quebec), articles written in French have graced the pages of the
Review only rarely (the mode and the median are one article per year;
the mean is 1.5).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Special Issues
This special issue is the 33rd in a series. Another window on the
Review's first half century can be opened by considering the themes
highlighted in that series. In his analysis of 45 years of the CRS(A),
Reza Nakhaie (2010) observed that, "through special issues on a
variety of topics, the CRS has kept pace and even at times led the
discipline as it has grown and moved into innovative areas" (p.
191). The chronological list of special-issue themes in the Appendix
provides basic data for some reflections of how the Review has managed
to keep pace, and even to lead.
In its first few years, the Review did not publish special issues.
Although the first special issue, opening volume 7 in 1970, focused on
the sociology of education--a theme centered in the classic work of John
Porter, Bernard Blishen, and others--four of the eight special issues
published before 1978 provided a venue for anthropological scholarship.
(6) Fulfilling this specific function meant that the 1970s would see the
greatest number of special issues (on average, since 1970 the Review has
published three special issues every four years, roughly--seven to eight
per decade). But apart from anthropology collections, the first wave of
special issues took up what we might term conventional,
"mainstream" sociological concerns--aspiring toward a
nomothetic comprehension of modern social life.
The telling exception was a 1975 special issue co-edited by Frances
Henry and Dorothy E. Smith on the role and status of women, whose lead
article, authored by Smith (1975; along with important contributions by
Armstrong and Armstrong [1975] and Gaskell [1975]), inaugurated a
transition to a more critical sociology of both gender and class, as Tom
Langford argues below. Concomitantly, by the mid-1970s the
Canadianization movement, which cut across disciplines in the social
sciences and humanities, was well under way; indeed, S.D. Clark, having
written in the first volume of the CRS(A) of "Canada and her great
neighbour" (Clark 1964) called a decade later for a sociology
"rooted in Canadian historical experience and having meaning in the
effort to understand how the Canadians society was structured and made
to survive" (Clark 1974:7). Whether one viewed the problem as one
of undue American influence based in asymmetry and propinquity (as Clark
did), or followed Stotzman and Gamberg (1975:100), writing in the first
issue of the CJS, into a radical critique of American
hegemony--endorsing a Fanonian "decolonization of the
spirit"--Canadianization became one of three intermingling
political-cultural currents reshaping the agendas, theoretical
frameworks, and methodologies of sociology in Canada. In her 1992
reflective essay, "Remaking a life, remaking sociology: reflections
of a feminist," Dorothy Smith recounted how in the 1970s, critique
of the colonization of experience, so central to Canadianization,
provided intellectual resources for developing her feminist sociology.
The socialist current flowing from the new left, in which Smith also
moved, furnished the third stream, portending a radicalization of class
analysis and of the already well-established Canadian political economy
tradition.
Thus, as many Canadian sociologists took up Thomas Symons's
(1975) call "to know ourselves" not through the lens of
universalizing American sociology but on the basis of lived realities in
Canada, more radical sociological perspectives, informed by feminist and
left perspectives, also gained traction. The remaking was a complex
transition in which concerns about the political-economic conditioning
of social life, about broadening our conception of the forms of social
power to include gender, and about grasping the specificity of Canada as
a distinct social formation influenced and amplified each other. As
Jeffery Cormier (2004) argued, Canadianization had the characteristics
of a social movement within and beyond the academy--as did feminism and
the new left. The movement "to know ourselves" meant placing
Canada and Canadians at the center of a grand narrative, fostering a
self-understanding that could contribute to more enlightened policies,
if not an empowered civil society. Within sociology, the movements of
feminism and the new left (the latter framed as the new political
economy) were entwined with Canadianization, and gave it political heft
pushing well beyond liberal nationalism. The point was not merely to
understand Canada but to change it.
Feminism and socialist political economy also became entwined with
each other, in part through feminism's critique, in the late 1970s,
of political economy's gender blindness. Within second-wave
feminism, socialist feminism exerted great intellectual influence, as
Pat and Hugh Armstrong, Margrit Eichler, Bonnie Fox, Roberta Hamilton,
Meg Luxton, Pat Marchak, Dorothy Smith, and others made significant
contributions to rethinking sociology with a sensitivity toward
intersections of gender and class. Canadian political economy in turn
showed an increasing interest in feminism and other movements, as it
took up a dialectic of political-economic structure and collective
agency. The shift is evident, for instance, in the changing titles of
the well-known collection Wallace Clement spearheaded: from The New
Canadian Political Economy (Clement and Williams 1989) through
Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy
(Clement 1997) to Changing Canada: Political Economy as Transformation
(Clement and Vosko 2002). (7) By the close of the 1980s, Robert Brym,
with Bonnie Fox, could summarize the remaking of Canadian sociology as a
paradigm shift "from culture to power" (Brym and Fox 1989).
All these convergent tendencies are reflected in the themes of
CRS(A) special issues from 1978 through 1993. Two special issues edited
by James McCrorie might be seen as marking the transition definitively,
first by exploring the national question and Quebec (1978), second by
taking up "dependency, underdevelopment and regionalism" in
Canadian society and internationally (1980). A year later, Wallace
Clement edited a special issue in honor of John Porter (1921-1979), whom
he aptly called "Canada's premier sociologist" (Clement
1981:583). It was, after all, Porter's seminal research on the
structure of Canadian society, culminating in The Vertical Mosaic
(1965), that more than any other single work established Canada as an
object for macrosociological investigation, and public sociology as
legitimate activity for sociologists (Helmes-Hayes 2010). Less a
celebration of Porter's contribution than a critical engagement
with his approach, the collection featured articles by collaborators,
colleagues, and students of Porter who had worked closely with him. Its
themes centered on the concerns central to Porter's macrosociology
of Canada: class, elites, education, occupational prestige and
attainment, and social mobility--all of them framed as analytic means
for comprehending the shape and form of Canadian society.
After a hiatus of four years, the Review published the first of two
special issues dedicated to The State of the Art and New Directions and
Sociology in Anglophone Canada, edited by John D. Jackson, continued the
Canadianist, macrosociological project, to pursue "a sociology of
Canada" that could foster a distinctively "Canadian
sociology" (Jackson 1985:615). The twenty-fifth anniversary issue
on feminist scholarship, co-edited by Pat Armstrong and Roberta Hamilton
and published in 1988, offered a succinct and impressively integrated
collection of empirical and theoretical work centered largely within a
feminist political-economic framework. In 1989, the special issue on
understanding Canada: comparative political economy perspectives, edited
by John Myles, marked perhaps the high tide of the political-economic
perspective within Anglophone Canadian sociology, and featured
comparative studies that in some respects went beyond the idiographic
emphasis on knowing ourselves, by situating Canada among the advanced
capitalist democracies. This was followed later in the year by a second
special issue on the state of the art and new directions, featuring the
distinctive contributions of Francophone Quebecois sociology, co-edited
by Danielle Juteau and Louis Maheu.
With three special issues published in the early 1990s, the
Review's horizons began to widen notably beyond the perspectives
that had helped center the field from the late 1970s through the 1980s.
This did not mean a renunciation of socialist feminism, of critical
political economy, or of concerns with the specificity of Canadian
society, but a reworking animated by engagement with emergent issues.
Remarkably, two years after the appearance of From Culture to Power, a
special issue on the challenge of cultural studies to Canadian sociology
and anthropology appeared, edited by Raymond A. Morrow. The challenge
could be seen as two fold: (1) studies in the discourses that partially
constitute the social (Valverde 1991) call into question the adequacy of
a sociology centered upon political economy; and (2) a sociological
poetics alive to the complex relations between lived and official
cultures (Jackson and Nielsen 1991) creates a pluralized, decentered
social imaginary, and subverts a unified conception of
"Canada." Yet, there was also space in this collection for
exploring convergences between political economy and cultural studies
(Harp 1991). A 1992 special issue edited by Neil Guppy featured research
on social inequality--a theme central within Canadian sociology since
Porter's and Blishen's studies of the 1950s--and continued the
Canadianist project, with articles on inequality in landed wealth in
nineteenth-century Ontario, the changing ethnic composition of Canadian
elites, and the economic implications of Quebec sovereignty for rest of
Canada, among other papers. In 1993, a special issue I edited on social
movements showed continuity with the problematic of understanding Canada
within political-economic and feminist frames while focusing on the
dynamics of movements in complex fields of contention and collective
identity construction.
By the time Gary Bowden edited a special issue on the environment
in 1994, the growing influence of social constructivist approaches,
highlighting the discursive moment of social life, was undeniable.
Moreover, contributors to the issue showed no concern to center their
analyses on "Canada," though Gaile McGregor (1994) did include
the issue of Canadian difference in her ruminations on environment,
spatiality, and representation.
A 1995 special issue on globalization edited by Gordon Laxer
featured both political-economic and constructionist approaches and
included two studies focused partly on Canada, but the analytical object
was clearly shifting beyond particular national borders.
The 1996 issue on critical perspectives in antiracism, co-edited by
George J. Sefa Dei and Agnes Calliste, was the first to address directly
the phenomenon of racism. It did so in a collection tightly focused
around the praxis of critical pedagogy in the service of antiracism.
Similarly tight substantive foci have been evident in most special
issues published since the late 1990s. The evolving practice seems to
focus on socially and politically salient topics, ranging widely from
sexual harassment (36.4), sex work (43.3), and sexuality (48.3) to
organizational crisis (35.3), security and surveillance (49.4), the
academy (39.3), genes and society (44.2), and the General Social Survey
(46.4) as a data resource. By thematizing emergent issues and
approaches, these collections have helped the Review to "keep
pace" and also to lead Canadian sociology into new areas. Each
special issue has had a specific, topical focus--as compared to earlier,
grand narrative themes such as Canadian history, feminism, and social
inequality. Perhaps this tightening of focus reflects the increasing
diversity of sociological work in Canada--it may no longer be feasible
to represent the "entire field" of, say, social inequality in
a single issue. But the tightening also may reflect, to some degree, a
postmodern skepticism toward grand narratives themselves. The one clear
exception to this trend, Negotiating Boundaries in a Globalizing World
(40.5), co-edited by Ann Denis and Aysan Sev'er, contained six
articles evenly balanced between studies of boundary negotiation within
and without Canada, thereby also balancing the Canadianist project
against a more "global sociology," as promulgated by Michael
Burawoy and others within the International Sociological Association (in
which Denis has played a particularly active leadership role).
If they now coexist with a host of other sociological approaches
and concerns, the themes of political economy, feminism, and
understanding Canada have not disappeared from the pages of the CRS.
Restricting ourselves here to special issues, a critical gender lens
(intersecting extensively with sexuality) is evident in several recent
collections. Special issues published since the mid-1990s typically
contain Canada-based empirical studies, and some of them (e.g., the 1999
special issue on sexual harassment, the 2012 special issue on security
and surveillance) have predominantly centered on actualities in Canada.
And although the special issue on genes and society, co-edited by
Shelley Z. Reuter and Katja Neves-Graca, maintained a lucid,
biopolitical reading of its object throughout, the issue on the Academy
in the twenty-first century, edited by Janice Drakich, Karen R. Grant,
and Penni Stewart struck a more political-economic tone. In the special
issue on sexuality, sexual health, and sexual rights, the editors noted
how several articles addressed "the intersections between social
inequality and state institutions as the latter reproduce the social
fault lines that they are mandated to dissolve" (Adam and
Matika-Tindale 2011:218)--a political-economic trope enriched, however,
by attention to "how the cultural imagination of the state
instantiates particular forms of gender and sexuality, then requires
conformity at the pain of exclusion or exile" (Adam and
Matika-Tyndale 2011:218).
So, it is that revisiting "culture" does not bring
Canadian sociology full circle, from "power" back to the
liberal, structural-functionalist moorings of the 1960s. On the one
hand, there is ample space in the CRS for explorations framed in
political-economic or other terms; on the other hand,
"culture" itself is now taken up as integral to power, with
power conceptualized as multifarious and intersectional. In the
rear-view mirror, we can see a movement from "structure"
conceived in cultural terms, to a more materialist rendition from the
mid-1970s and into the 1990s, to post-structuralism as one of several
active strains comprising contemporary sociological analysis.
Concurrently, beginning in the 1990s, we can discern a growing emphasis
on movements and collective agency of various types, and a tendency,
directly acknowledged by some special-issue editors (e.g., Adam and
Matika-Tindale 2011; Lyon and Wood 2012), toward scholarship that is, at
once, sociological and interdisciplinary. Whether the latter might be
taken to indicate the decline of a coherent sociological community, or
perhaps the elaboration of sociology's own promise as a crucial
nexus bridging across disciplinary silos (as in Carroll 2013), is yet
another topic for ongoing debate.
The Articles
In view of what I have written above, it would have been a
mug's game to mark the CRS's fiftieth anniversary with a
collection of articles purporting to represent the wide sweep of
contemporary Canadian sociology. This issue highlights a few key themes,
recognizing that doing so leaves aside many worthy concerns and
approaches. If this collection does not survey the field, it does
exemplify how the Review continues to keep pace with developments in
sociological research, and even to lead sociology into innovative areas.
Pat Armstrong's (2013) inquiry into skills within various
labor processes and work settings exemplifies the continuing vitality of
both feminism and political economy as sociological lenses. In an
analysis that builds on several literatures, including feminist
scholarship on care, she considers the economic, social, and structural
forces, operating at multiple scales, that shape "what is
recognized, valued, and practiced" as skill. Her study points
forward, to more nuanced, historical-political and reflexive
investigations, sensitive to context, that question both the dichotomies
that organize received understandings of skill and the power relations
that render some skills invisible, undervalued, or unusable.
Andrea Doucet (2013) also takes up the issue of care and its
materiality, but views the former as entangled in embodied practices and
relations. Relying on both the feminist materialism pioneered by Dorothy
Smith and recent "new materialisms," she recounts a research
program that has mobilized narratives from male caregivers to rethink
care within shifting "material-discursive embodied relations."
New theoretical lenses enable us to see care within the rich, emergent
entanglements of body-social relations, avoiding both the essentialism
of earlier thinking on embodiment/gender, and the idealism that has
dogged constructionist approaches since the "linguistic turn."
The next two articles offer comprehensive, retrospective analyses
of CRS(A) articles published during the Review's first half
century. Tom Langford (2013) discusses over 100 articles on class,
showing the contested nature of the concept and identifying the main
analytical trajectories. He highlights several themes, some of them
already active in Canadian sociology's early years (e.g., plural
elite research), some emergent after the mid-1970s (e.g., Marxian class
analysis; class, gender, and [eventually] racialization; working class
research), some ascendant in the past couple of decades (e.g.,
Bourdieusian studies of cultural capital and habitus; class struggle and
social democratic politics)--and all of them contributing to a rich but
fragmented body of knowledge that remains a source of both interpretive
and explanatory sociology.
Howard Ramos (2013) offers a retrospective look at the usage of
"ethnicity" and "race" within the CRS over its first
half century. He documents an interesting shift from ethnicity to race
as organizing constructs, even as the meaning of these keywords has
become contested within emergent postcolonial and social constructionist
approaches. As lenses for sociological analysis, ethnicity and race have
been reshaped and refocused, but at the same time, changes in social
policy and immigration patterns have materially altered the social
conditions within which ethnicity and race are lived. New treatments of
these constructs in recent years register these changes, both in
sociological perspective and in Canadian society.
Finally, Lori Wilkinson et al. (2013) engage with the continuing
legacy, and challenge, of Canadianization. Tracing the country of PhD of
assistant professor sociologists, they find that sociologists trained
abroad are advantaged in the academic labor market, compared to those
trained in Canada--but that the advantage accrues only at large,
medical/doctoral institutions. In most postsecondary institutions, and
especially in colleges and universities without graduate programs,
sociologists of junior rank are overwhelmingly Canadian trained. The
latter is good news for Canadian doctoral programs. Still, one might
wonder about the bifurcating implications of a pattern in which
sociology departments in large, medical/doctoral institutions recruit
mostly U.S.-trained PhDs, in step perhaps with a move toward the
two-tier university system some "CEOs" of the medical/doctoral
institutions have openly advocated (Charbonneau 2009). As Wilkinson et
al. conclude, the debate about the vitality and quality of Canadian
sociology needs to continue, along with (I might add) the myriad other
debates, discussions, and inquiries that give Canadian sociology its
dynamism and critical edge.
Appendix: Canadian Review of Sociology (and Anthropology)
Special Issues, 1970-2013
Volume
and
Title Editor(s) Year issue
The Sociology of Education Jan J. Loubser 1970 7.1
Social Networks Dan R. Aronson 1970 7.4
Formal Theory and R. A. H. Robson 1971 8.4
Experimental
Research
L'Indien dans la societe Pierre Beaucage 1972 9.3
latino-americaine actuelle:
le cas du Mexique (The
Indian in Current Latin-
American Society: The
Case of Mexico)
New Directions in J. I. Prattis 1973 10.3
Economic Anthropology
Fertility 1974 11.4
Symposium on the History Michael Ames and 1975 12.3
of Canadian Anthropology Richard Preston
Anthropology of the Richard Frucht 1977 14.4
Commonwealth Caribbean
Women in the Canadian Frances Henry and 1975 12.4
Social Structure Dorothy E. Smith
Special Issue on Quebec: James McCrorie 1978 15.2
The National Question
Dependency, Underdevelopment, James McCrorie 1980 17.3
and Regionalism
Special Issue in the Memory Wallace Clement 1981 18.5
of John Porter 1921-1979
The State of the Art and New John D. Jackson 1985 22.5
Directions
Sociology in Anglophone
Canada
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Pat Armstrong and 1988 25.2
Issue: Feminist Scholarship Roberta Hamilton
Comparative Political John Myles 1989 26.1
Economy
State of the Art Issue: Danielle Juteau and 1989 26.3
Francophone Quebecois Louis Maheu
Sociology
Cultural Studies in Canada Raymond A. Morrow 1991 28.2
Social Inequality Neil Guppy 1992 29.2
New Directions in the Study William K. Carroll 1993 30.3
of Social Movements
The Environment Gary Bowden 1994 31.3
Globalization Gordon Laxer 1995 32.3
Critical Perspectives in George J. Sefa Dei 1996 33.3
Anti-Racism and Agnes Calliste
Canadian Anthropology in an Peter Harries-Jones 1997 34.3
International Context
Organizations Crisis Albert J. Mills 1998 35.3
Sexual Harassment Aysan Sev'er 1999 36.4
The Academy in the Twenty- Janice Drakich, 2002 29.3
First Century Karen R. Grant,
and Penni Stewart
Negotiating Boundaries in Ann Denis and 2003 40.5
a Globalizing World Aysan Sev'er
Critical Issues and New Cecilia Benoit and 2006 43.3
Directions in Sex Work Frances M. Shaver
Research
Genes and Society: Looking Shelley Z. Reuter 2007 44.2
Back on the Future and Katja
Neves-Graca
Introduction to the Heather Dryburgh 2009 46.4
General Social Survey
Emerging Directions in Barry Adam and 2011 48.3
Sociological Research Eleanor Maticka-
on Sexuality Tyndale
Security, Surveillance, David Lyon and David 2012 49.4
and Sociological Analysis Murakami Wood
Fiftieth Anniversary of William K. Carroll 2013 50.3
the CRS(A)
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William K. Carroll
University of Victoria
I thank CRS editor, Reza Nakhaie, for his extensive and unwavering
support, both practical and intellectual, and J.P. Sapinski for
assistance in preparing tables and figures.
William K. Carroll, Department of Sociology, University of
Victoria, PO Box 3050 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3P5. E-mail:
wcarroll@uvic.ca
(1) Until 2007, the Association was named the Canadian Sociology
and Anthropology Association (CSAA) and its journal the Canadian Review
of Sociology and Anthropology (CRSA). In that year, the Association
acquired its current name; in February 2008, its journal began
publishing as the CRS. In this introduction, I will use the slightly
awkward CRS(A) when referring to the journal over its entire first
half-century.
(2) "Introduction to the Canadian Sociological
Association." Retrieved April 16, 2013 (https://www. csa-scs
.ca/introduction).
(3) From the mid-1970s until 2008, when anthropology was dropped
from the masthead, the CRSA had both a sociology and anthropology
editor. In some of those years, the anthropology content was
concentrated within special issues (of which more below). But often, the
occasional anthropology article would appear within issues predominantly
devoted to sociological research. All this began to change when Canadian
anthropologists formed their own association in 1974. See footnote 6,
below.
(4) Affiliations of anthropology editors were, from the start,
diverse. The 10 anthropology editors who served between 1975 and 2006
were from 10 different institutions in 5 provinces.
(5) On the anthropology side, all editors were male from 1975 to
1996, and female from 1996 to 2006.
(6) Here, "special issue" refers to an issue carrying its
own thematic title and (typically) editor's introduction. Although
an issue of diverse anthropology articles, edited by Peter Carstens,
appeared in 1979, after the 1977 special issue on Anthropology of the
Commonwealth Caribbean, edited by Richard Frucht, the CRSA would not
publish another anthropology-themed special issue for two decades. In
the meantime, the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), established in
1974, became the professional association for the great majority of
anthropologists in Canada, and its official journal, launched in 1981,
became the main venue for anthropological scholarship. The 1997 special
issue on Canadian Anthropology in an International Context, edited by
Peter Harries-Jones, would be the last with an anthropology focus. 1997
was also the year in which two Canadian anthropology journal merged.
Since 1998, Anthropologica has been the flagship journal for CASCA.
(7) It is well to note that the transition occurred amid closely
related developments in Canadian social scholarship that saw the
establishment of interdisciplinary journals in which sociologists often
played (and continue to play) leading roles, such as Labour/Le Travail
in 1976, Studies in Political Economy in 1979, and the launch of the
Society for Socialist Studies in 1981 (which in its earlier incarnation
as the Committee on Socialist Studies had begun publishing a journal in
1979). These publishing venues helped create a critical mass for an
interdisciplinary community of radical scholarship, which would exert an
influence within the CSAA throughout and beyond the 1980s.
Table 1
Editors of the Canadian Review of Sociology
(and Anthropology), 1964-2013
Editor-Soc (or
Editor in Chief Term Term
1964-1975) Affiliation beginning end
Jean Burnet U of T 1964 1968
Frank E. Jones McMaster 1968 1974
Lynn McDonald McMaster 1971 1972
(acting editor)
Raymond Breton U of T 1974 1976
James McCrorie U of Regina 1976 1979
John Jackson Concordia 1979 1982
Peta Tancred-Sheriff McMaster 1982 1986
Robert Brym U of T 1986 1989
James Curtis Waterloo 1989 1992
Marlene Mackie Calgary 1992 1994
Rosalind Sydie U of A 1994 1997
Murray Knutilla U of Regina 1997 2000
Bill Carroll U Vic 2000 2003
Marilyn Porter Memorial 2003 2006
Ralph Matthews UBC 2006 2009
Reza Nakhaie U of Windsor 2009 2013
Rima Wilkes UBC 2013 2016
Term Term
Editor-Anthro Affiliation beginning end
Richard Frucht U of A 1975 1978
Peter Carstens U of T 1978 1981
Louis-Jacques Dorais U Laval 1982 1985
Pieters J. De Vries Concordia 1985 1988
Gail Pool UNB 1988 1991
Max J. Hedley Windsor 1991 1994
Peter Harries-Jones York 1994 1996
Constance de Roche University 1996 2000
College of
Cape Breton
Belinda Leach Guelph 2000 2003
Jane Helleiner Brock 2003 2006
