Canadian Sociology 1

80 The American Sociologist / Spring 2004

Neil McLaughlin is an associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he teachessociological theory. His research interests are in sociological theory, the sociology of culture, and the study ofintellectuals from the perspective of the sociology of organizations and professions. He is studying EdwardSaid as a “global public intellectual” as part of a Canadian government-funded interdisciplinary grant on“Globalization and Autonomy” at McMaster University. He is also working on “Canadian professors as publicintellectuals,” a project also funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

A Canadian Rejoinder: Sociology Northand South of the Border

NEIL MCLAUGHLIN

In response to the recent The American Sociologist special issue on Canadian sociology, this re-joinder dialogues with some of the perspectives offered there on the discipline north of the bor-der with an eye towards lessons that American sociologists might learn from the Canadian expe-rience. My reflections build on a larger analytic piece entitled “Canada’s Impossible Science: TheHistorical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis of Anglo-Canadian Sociology” to bepublished soon in The Canadian Journal Sociology. Particular attention is paid to the differentinstitutional arrangements of higher education in Canada and the United States, Anglo-Cana-dian reliance on the particularly English “weakness as strength” strategy for sociology, tensionsbetween the cultural values of populism, egalitarianism, and excellence, and the trade-offs be-tween professional and public intellectual work. A critique is offered of the “origin myth” ofCanadian sociology as a particularly vibrant “critical sociology,” with discussion of Dorothy Smith’sinfluence on sociology in Canada.

The recent The American Sociologist special issue on Canadian sociology has opened upspace for more dialogue across the border between American and Canadian sociologies at aparticularly opportune time for the discipline (Brym, 2002; Cormier, 2002; 2001; Eichler,2002; Fournier, 2002; Helmes-Hayes, 2002; Ogmundson, 2002; Smith, 2002; Nock, 2002;Côté and Dagenais, 2002). Sociology is a discipline always, seemingly, in crisis, but at thepresent moment finds us at a particularly reflexive and critical period regarding our role inthe university and the broader society. The themes of the ASA meetings on “Public Sociolo-gies” (2004) and “The Rising and the Declining Significance of Sociology” (2005) respec-tively suggests a broad interest in debating, clarifying and examining our place in the intel-lectual/academic universe. Dialogue between Canadian and American sociologists has muchto offer the broader discipline of sociology, and the special issue provides an excellent op-portunity for discussion of common concerns and different perspectives.

How, one might ask, would American sociologists benefit from a dialogue with the dis-cipline north of the border? Canadian sociology, as I argue elsewhere, brings three majorinsights to the table in any dialogue across the border between our respective national disci-

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plines (McLaughlin, forthcoming). Canadian sociology has a potentially strong multi-methodapproach to sociology that offers a way out of narrow multivariate mainstream sociology(Alford, 1998). Sociologists in the United States are increasingly arguing for the need formore space for historical/comparative and interpretive approaches to complement the “posi-tivist” dominance of the ASR/AJS/Social Forces core of the discipline, issues Canadians havemuch experience with as our methodological approaches tend to be more diverse (Guppyand Arai, 1994). In addition, Canadian sociology has a particularly strong critical traditionthat fits the space our discipline needs to fill in the coming political and intellectual period(Brym with Fox, 1989; Brym, 2002; Clement and Myles, 1994; Eichler, 2002; Cormier,2002, McLaughlin, forthcoming; Nock, 2002). Canadian sociology is very much the “radi-cal” and “critical” sociology that many internal critics of mainstream sociology in the UnitedStates desire. This comparative example offers insights into both the promise as well as thedangers of a radical sociological imagination. Finally, we also offer a potentially “optimalmarginality” forged on the edge of the American empire that allows us, perhaps, to see somethings about American sociology that can be missed from the “insider” perspective.1 Whilethe present period in world history has seen the emergence of massive and irrational anti-Americanism worldwide alongside of all too legitimate criticisms of American foreign policy,American sociologists sometimes share in the parochialism of their own nation.2 Canadiansmight offer a bridge into understanding of the world outside of North American from theperspective of sympathetic friends who share as much as any two nations in the world whileremaining distinct nations, cultures and people.

This paper is an analysis of the present crisis in sociology from the perspective of a Cana-dian scholar who hopes to bring a critical but friendly perspective into American debatesabout the future of the discipline.3 This essay will draw on the analysis outlined in “Canada’sImpossible Science: The Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis of Anglo-Canadian Sociology,” a paper that will be appearing in The Canadian Journal of Sociology.While stressing the uniqueness and strengths of Canadian sociology, my larger C.J.S. analy-sis argues that Canadian sociology is on the verge of an institutional crisis due to threemajor factors. One source of Canadian sociology’s “troubles” is the fact that the discipline isembedded in the institutional environment of the Canadian higher education system, aremarkably “flat” system with little of the hierarchy and differentiation that marks Ameri-can universities. Secondly, sociology in English Canada has a long history of reliance onBritish sociology, the institutionally weakest of national sociologies in major advanced in-dustrial nations. Historically English literary studies, history and anthropology as well aspolicy oriented applied social research, have taken up much of the niche space in universi-ties occupied by sociology in Germany, France, and especially the United States (Abrams,1968; Kent, 1981; Kumar, 1990). The British discipline have adopted to their institutionalweakness by turning their permeability into a selling point, marketing themselves as anundergraduate student friendly “science of the post-modern” as Steve Fuller puts it (Fuller,2000). As a result of Anglo-Canadian reliance on British intellectual culture, we have im-ported this particularly English “weakness as strength” strategy for disciplinary consolida-tion, an institutional liability in the present intellectual and university environment. Thirdly,since sociology in English Canada institutionalized as late as the 1960s and 1970s, its leftwing and activist origins weakened the development of the politically diverse and intellectu-ally oriented professional culture necessary for survival in the social sciences in modernuniversities.

In this paper, I will draw on the analysis outlined in this larger paper while commentingon The American Sociologist special issue on Canadian sociology with an eye towards devel-


opments in sociology south of the border. The essay is intended to offer a warning regardingpossible American sociological futures, with insights that flow from some critical distancefrom American sociology and from observations from the Canadian experience and ex-ample. It is useful to sharpen the analytic focus of our cross border intellectual dialogues,however, by considering specific lessons that American sociologists might learn from a seri-ous look at some issues not stressed in The American Sociologist special issue on CanadianSociology. Firstly, I will draw on an analysis of the flat institutional structure of Canadianhigher education and my perspective on the particularly anti-authoritarian, even anarchist,nature of Canadian sociology today to offer a warning to American sociology about thedangers of the excessive populism and anti-elitism that one sees in the Canadian discipline.We will be particularly concerned with raising questions about the institutional complexi-ties of the sociology of scholarly excellence and the trade-offs inherent in attempts to de-velop “public sociologies,” issues brought to light when one examines Canadian academiclife and culture.

As this analysis unfolds, I will offer reflections on the problems that we have seen inCanada that comes from sociologists romanticizing European social theory, a particulardilemma for Canadians with regards the British version of the discipline but a broaderconcern in an increasingly “post-modern” sociology in the United States. The major histo-rians of sociology in English Canada, particularly Harry Hiller and Richard Helmes-Hayeshave shown how traditional British opposition to American style sociology in mid-centuryCanada slowed down the development of the discipline (Helmes-Hayes, 2002; Hiller, 1982;Hiller, 1981; Hiller, 1979). Unfortunately, however, The American Sociologist special issueon Canadian sociology failed to address directly the continuing influence of a particularlyBritish “weakness as strength” strategy for the discipline that continues to weaken sociologynorth of the border to this day. Just as American leftists like Michael Moore can romanticizeCanadian urban life by imagining that no one needs to lock their doors in Toronto, Ameri-can sociologists run the risk of creating an imaginary view of a more “open,” “critical,” or“interdisciplinary” Canadian sociology. This dream of “opening up” sociology to interdisci-plinary approaches and European social theory has nightmare qualities when looked at upclose, particularly when one see how “cultural studies” and applied sociology in Canadiansociology combine to close out space for a theoretically driven but empirically orientedsociological imagination. Richard Helmes-Hayes’s analysis of Canada’s most famous soci-ologist, John Porter, in particular, helps us address some of the key issues that Canadiansociology must confront as it endeavours to combine the best of American and Europeansociological traditions, a balance not always struck easily (Helmes-Hayes, 2002).

Finally, we will look at the “origin myths” about Canadian “critical” sociology promotedby Margrit Eichler’s and Jeffrey Cormier’s essays (Eichler, 2002; Cormier, 2002).4 Sociology’sinstitutional health and intellectual success depend not on the methods and organizationalforms of the natural sciences or the “cultural capital” of traditional humanities such asphilosophy or literature. Instead, we require a coherent intellectual core to the discipline,rooted, I will argue, in sociology’s distinctive multi-method theorizing of society linked toboth empirical evidence and public dialogue (Alford, 1998; Merton, 1949).5 The exampleof sociology in Canada, however, shows how excessive intellectual nationalism and simplis-tic platitudes about “critical sociology” can impede rather than help promote the develop-ment of a strong disciplinary core. Ogmundson’s excellent essay “The Canadian Case: Cor-nucopia of Neglected Research Opportunities” is right to suggest that there are enormousopportunities for empirical sociological analysis on the case of Canada, but we need to gofurther than he does in understanding the structural and sociological reasons for Canadian

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sociology’s unfulfilled potential (Ogmundson, 2002). Given new developments in the criti-cal humanities and enormous institutional pressures towards practical relevance in contem-porary universities, the Canadian case illustrates the threat to academic standards wheninterdisciplinary approaches are promoted uncritically by university administrators and aca-demic entrepreneurs alike. The case of Anglo-Canadian sociology also helps bring to lightsome institutional and historical dynamics of concern to those concerned with preserving aspace for the sociological imagination in the United States and internationally.

Tocqueville’s Revenge: Anarchists in the Snow

Seymour Martin Lipset taught Americans that their northern neighbors were culturallyconservative Tories and social democrats whose respect for authority was inscribed intoculture and values defined in direct opposition to the individualistic and anarchist values ofrevolutionary Americans. There has been an extensive and heated debate in Canada aboutthis “Lipset thesis,” the details too complicated to go into in this paper (Adams, 1997;Grabb and Curtis, 1988; Baer, Grabb, and Johnston, 1990; Baer, Grabb, and Johnston,1993; Lipset, 1990; Ogmundson, 1994). Lipset has provided the basic analytic frameworkfor comparative U.S./Canadian studies, even though many of the details of his analysis arequestionable. One thing that is clear, however, is that when one looks at the structure ofCanadian higher education and the culture of Canadian sociology, Lipset called it exactlywrong.

Far from being rooted in the Tory respect for hierarchy and distinction embedded inEuropean forms of elite higher education, the structure of Canadian higher education isremarkably egalitarian and flat. A key aspect of the institutional terrain that provides themacro context for the development of Anglo-Canadian sociology is the institutional flat-ness of the social structure of Canadian higher education (Davies and Guppy, 1997; Daviesand Hammock, forthcoming). Canadian universities, when compared to the American or,in different ways, the European higher education system, are remarkably homogenous acrossa range of institutions. That is to say, while there are elite universities in Canada (mostobviously McGill and the University of Toronto, and perhaps Queens), the differences be-tween these institutions, and less prominent research universities, and the primarily teach-ing institutions are rather small. The Canadian university system is flat in comparison to thedivide between the private elite institutions like Harvard or Yale, elite public institutionslike Berkeley or Madison, more mass public institutions like Ohio State or The City Uni-versity of New York (CUNY), and the hundreds of public local and regional universitiesacross the United States. Moreover, Canadian universities are essentially public and thus theCanadian higher education system does not have the scores of relatively elite liberal artsschools like Reed, Oberlin, Swarthmore, Bard or Hamilton College that are such an impor-tant part of college life in the United States.

In Canada, a national market for universities does not exist as it does in the UnitedStates. Students generally go to university locally, or they go to the United States or Europe.This softens the brutal competitive edge that drives so much of what happens in Americanuniversities. SAT or GRE exams are not essential parts of the admissions process in Canadaas they are in the United States (Davis and Hammack, forthcoming). The tuition is more orless the same low level in most English Canadian universities, and even lower in Quebec. InOntario, for example, one can attend the massive and prestigious research oriented Univer-sity of Toronto, or Brock University or Trent (two small teaching oriented schools), or themoderate sized research institutions such as McMaster or Queens, all for essentially the


same price.6 Canadian universities, moreover, do not have huge endowments like Harvardor Yale, and do not have a tradition of raising money from alumni. Nor are big businessoriented, high profile sports programs a major part of the Canadian academic scene. Andcertainly no Canadian universities have the long and rich elite traditions of Oxford, Cam-bridge, or the great French or German institutions of higher learning. Some of this is chang-ing, of course, as Canadian university administrators attempt to raise tuitions in differentialways for professional programs, move towards what have been called “academic capitalism,”and compete in an international context with major international universities (the Univer-sity of Toronto, for example, has been building a large American style endowment) (Slaugh-ter and Leslie, 1999). Historically, however, Canadian universities have a local and provin-cial feel to them, with the partial exceptions of the University of Toronto and McGill. Thisrelatively flat structure and local culture creates a situation whereby the intellectual leader-ship of the elite institutions is not accepted lower down in the institutional hierarchy (Polster,2002). The very idea of elite institutions of higher education runs against the modern Ca-nadian grain, although obviously Canada’s roots in the British Empire provides a back-ground history of elitism that still is embedded in university practice and culture.

These points are documented in the comparative literature on educational systems (Daviesand Guppy, 1997; Davies and Hammock, forthcoming), but the relationship between theseinstitutional structures have never been systematically linked to an analysis of the health ofCanadian sociology, in particular. Part of the issue is political. Much of the leadership ofCanadian sociology is made up of tenured academics with New Left and Marxist roots and/or left-liberal sensibilities.7 They are thus generally critical of the hierarchy and competitionembedded in the American higher education system as well as the elitism inherent in insti-tutions such as Oxford or Yale. This creates an unexpected irony. The very egalitarianism ofthe Canadian university system does systematic and powerful damage to the institutionalhealth of sociology, the most left wing and egalitarian of the disciplines.

The reasons for this irony are obvious when one is willing to reflect on them, and spellthem out. Sociology as a discipline has relatively low status and power in modern universi-ties. We lack the scientific status and prestige of the natural sciences, the traditional culturalcapital given to art history, literature, or philosophy, or the links to powerful institutionalforces that engineering, commerce, law, or medical schools possess. Even among the rela-tively less powerful social sciences, sociology is a poor cousin. We lack the intellectual andorganizational consensus around a “mature” science model that has allowed psychology andeconomics to increase their power and status. Psychology and economics have forged alli-ances between their respective professions and the biological sciences and clinical practice,on the one hand, and economic elite and the larger cultural forces of neo-liberal economicorthodoxy, on the other. Political science, to take another example, has links to state power,electoral systems, and applied administrative science both at the domestic and internationallevel which provide powerful outside allies for the profession. Moreover, political science isa politically diverse discipline, with far more room for conservatives and liberals than insociology, a discipline with a strongly left-liberal even social movement oriented consensus,especially in Canada (Cormier, 2002; Cormier, 2004a). This greater political diversity pro-vides institutional support for the profession among powerful societal institutions, and cre-ates professionalizing processes that are weaker in sociology.

None of this, of course, suggests that either the American “contest” or the old European“sponsorship” models of higher education are necessarily superior to Canada’s hybrid sys-tem. There is much to recommend in Canada’s educational arrangements. The amount ofpublic and private money that goes into the highly competitive American educational sys-

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tem is enormous, creating credential inflation and an upper middle class with huge tuitionsbills and an increasingly right–wing aversion to paying taxes. The American system of highereducation creates a strain on resources that could be directed at public health care, a decentwelfare state, and a more democratic state funded electoral political system not linked soclearly to corporate interests as well as, in the case of California today, celebrity culture. TheCanadian educational system is affordable, it provides quality undergraduate education to alarge number of students and academic scholarship in Canada operates at a reasonably highstandard. And the system is slowly moving beyond some of the traditional conservatisminherited from its roots in Canadian religious institutions and the British elite model of itscolonial past. The system works. The consequences of this system for Canadian sociology inparticular, however, are negative, very serious, and seldom discussed.

There are other disciplines that face similar institutional problems, particularly anthro-pology and literary studies. These disciplines are, sociologists sometimes forget, our compe-tition for limited resources in universities increasingly dominated by applied programs, thenatural sciences and professional schools. Sociology often ends up a dominated discipline,in Bourdieu’s terms, providing popular “service” undergraduate classes for the university asa whole and increasingly being pushed by powerful institutional forces towards appliedareas like health, criminology, and gerontology (Bourdieu, 1984b). In addition, the discipline’sintellectual autonomy and distinctiveness is being undermined relative to the growing trendstowards cultural studies, media and communication and political activism in the contem-porary “critical” humanities. These points, again, are well documented in the literature onthe state of sociology, but what is less clearly remarked upon are the consequences for soci-ology of different forms of institutional arrangements in higher education (Abbott, 2001;Berger, 2001; Becker, 2001; Buxton, 1992; Calhoun, 1992; Cole, 2001a; Cole, 2001b;Collins, 2001; Crane, 1992; Gouldner, 1979; Halliday, 1992; Huber, 2001: Lipset, 2001;Molotch, 2001; Stinchcombe, 2001).

In the United States, sociology is also a dominated discipline, but a Harvard, Stanford,Columbia, or Chicago sociologist remains a Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, or University ofChicago professor. While some of the best American sociology historically has been pro-duced at public universities such as Berkeley or Madison-Wisconsin, it is the competitionbetween these various levels of the American university system that drives public institu-tions to compete with private universities and hold to standards of excellence themselves.The cultural status of the elite institutions (both public and private) provides a halo effectthat inevitably helps the public standing of the discipline, a dynamic that simply does nothave the same power in Canada (Merton, 1949; Bourdieu, 1984a). Moreover, the networksof sociologists at the dozens of elite research institutions in United States have very powerfulincentives to improve the public standing of their discipline, providing a competitive andprofessionalizing edge in the profession that runs through the activities of The AmericanSociological Association. Furthermore in Canada, sociology’s status is far less in the culture asa whole, and the incentives run the other way.

Sociologists at Canada’s elite institutions are not deeply involved in the activities of thesociological association, and they largely find recognition for their professional accomplish-ments in the United States or internationally (Brym, 2003). Given this institutional con-text, it is rational behavior for status conscious elite sociologists to distance themselves fromthe Canadian sociological community. This is essentially what has happened within Cana-dian sociology as has been discussed in a widely read piece in The Canadian Journal ofSociology last year: “The Decline of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association”(Brym, 2003). Canadian sociologists, it should be remembered, operate in a joint anthro-


pology/sociology association that holds its annual meetings not as an autonomous profes-sional association but as part of a national gathering of British style Learned Societies. Themeetings are generally not attended by the strongest publishing Canadian sociologists, manyof the panels at the meetings are dominated by student presentations and the scholarlystandards are relatively low. There is a very real danger that Canadian sociology will cease toexist as a serious core social science discipline in Canadian universities over the next coupleof decades, being replaced by cultural studies, communication studies, and a variety ofapplied programs such as criminology, gerontology and health (Brym, 2003; Curtis andWeir, 2002; McLaughlin, forthcoming; O’Malley and Hunt, 2002).

These problems have a history. Sociology in Canada is relatively new, not particularlywell regarded by senior university administrators, and often plays a “service teaching” rolein Canadian universities. Interdisciplinary programs are all the rage in Canada today, andsociology as a discipline has not shown much willingness to resist trends towards increasingenrollments and interdisciplinary hiring. As a result, Canadian sociology departments havehired a rather large number of faculty in recent years without Ph.D. level training in ourown discipline. In my own department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, forexample, three of the last seven tenure track appointments were to scholars without Ph.Dsin sociology. At the University of Alberta, in addition, a sociology department that had atradition of being a mainstream empirical American oriented sociology department nowhas a very large cultural studies/literary feel to its theoretical orientation, with little room forwhat we would describe as mainstream sociological theory linked to empirical sociologicalresearch. And they have hired a significant number of non-sociologists in the last number ofyears. As Richard Ogmundson puts it in The American Sociologist, “according to some sources,this former centre of quantitative strength has been decimated” (Ogmundson, 2002: 60).This judgment is perhaps harsh, but there are reasonable questions to be raised about whetherCanadian sociology has the will to be able to pass on our discipline’s unique perspective(Brym, 2003; Curtis and Weir, 2002; McLaughlin, forthcoming; O’Malley and Hunt, 2002).

Some “critical” American sociologists, of course, might find these trends appealing. CharlesLemert, for example, remarked approvingly in the “critical theory” plenary in the theorymini-conference at the 2003 ASA meetings that Canadian sociology seemed home to astrong alternative critical theory tradition. What I am struck with, in contrast, is how littlemany Canadian “post-modern” or “critical theorists” in the discipline are interested in dia-loguing with formal theorists and empirical researchers of the mainstream. This suggests tome that Canadian critical theory in sociology is not particularly innovative and open, butinstead represents an imported new dogma and a further fragmentation of the discipline.8

These trends affect sociologists worldwide, of course, as book stores increasingly house “cul-tural studies” sections that dwarf the sociology holdings and the cultural turn creates newspace for social theory in our discipline often in opposition to traditional sociological theory.

These trends play themselves out in particular ways in Canada because of the structure ofour higher education system and the culture of our students and faculty. While traditionalelitism still retains a place in the larger political culture and in the fabric of many Canadianpolitical institutions, Canadian sociology, in particular, is a home for remarkably stronganarchist, individualistic, and anti-authoritarian tendencies. Many Canadian sociology pro-grams, for example, went much farther than most American departments in institutionaliz-ing graduate student and even undergraduate student involvement in hiring and tenureprocesses during the 1970s. Faculty authority in Canadian sociology is relatively weak, asevidenced by a very strong student dominance of presentations at the professional meetings.

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Canadian society as a whole may retain some of the old-fashioned Tory conservatism cen-tral to Lipset’s analysis, but this is long dead within sociology itself.

The dynamics set in motion by Canadian sociology’s profound rejection of traditionalacademic authority, moreover, holds an important lesson for sociologists south of the bor-der. Critiques of the mainstream sociology represented by ASR and AJS, as well as the oppo-sition to the control of the intellectual agenda of the discipline often held by sociologists atBerkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Madison, and Yale have deep roots in American history andthe origins of the discipline. The debates about opening up the major journals to moreinterpretive and historical work in contrast to purely multivariate scholarship have beenpositive for sociology (Alford, 1998). Normal science can be boring science, and there isnothing wrong with a little of the C. Wright Mills populism and radical rejection of disci-plinary orthodoxies that has always been so important in the history of the discipline, aswell as serious attempts to follow various “cultural” and “historical” approaches so influen-tial today.

Nonetheless, the Canadian example suggests that when a rejection of authority goes toofar, the discipline as a whole suffers. There is no question that Canadians and Canadianinstitutions, in general, retain many aspects of the traditional respect for authority empha-sized in Lipset’s analysis of a nation rooted in “peace, order and good government” not “life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Lipset, 1990). The Canadian case, however, shouldhelp remind American sociologists why we need disciplinary elites, even if as sociologistsand citizens we are compelled and even obligated to continue efforts to open up our disci-pline to new ideas while guarding against disciplinary orthodoxies and nepotism. Having adisciplinary elite helps establish links to societal resources and respect for the discipline ofsociology, essential components for the health of the profession. Moreover, while there ismuch justification for critiquing old fashioned intellectual elites, a discipline without clearlydefined intellectual standards, will, in the corporate, state and “student as consumer” domi-nated university systems we operate in, quickly devolve not into a radical and innovativecritical sociology, but to the common denominator of specialized mediocrity. Sociology willbecome a “grab bag” discipline with no intellectual coherence, providing entertaining classeson social problems for students, service teaching for applied programs, a funding source forincreasingly grant-oriented deans, and a home for the latest trend in the “critical” humani-ties (Turner and Turner, 1990).

This is essentially what is happening in the Canadian case. Without a strong consensuson the need for scholarly excellence and with the absence of a sociologically oriented intel-lectual elite involved in the discipline in Canada, faculty in our departments share little incommon with each other. Competition for jobs, status, and graduate students is under-taken not by quality scholarship but by networks and number of publications. In this bravenew world of mediocrity, all publications are equal and the size of research grants trumpsscholarly quality. While a culture that sees only publications in The American SociologicalReview or American Journal of Sociology as worth anything can promote intellectual sterility,a professional culture with little willingness to make distinctions between quality of jour-nals, as is the case in much of Canadian sociology, has its own very real problems. In theCanadian context, moreover, credential inflation for graduate students is so out of controlat this point, that first and second year students are busy publishing in a variety of relativelylow quality “peer reviewed” journals before they have learned enough sociological theory,methods or substance to have all that much to say. Because the discipline in Canada cannot,at this point, even agree that the standards of even the top twenty or so journals in sociologyshould be our “gold standard,” we have created an “anything goes” culture (outside, it should


be said, of McGill and, for the most part, the University of Toronto) where just about anypublication at all counts for scholarships or tenure and promotion. A distrust of elites canlead very easily into a rejection of all standards—one need not share Tocqueville’s aristo-cratic values to be concerned about the consequences of this for our sociological scholar-ship.

This credential inflation has very real consequences for the public sociologies Americansociologists are discussing these days. In the American case, the scholars who are arguing fora public sociology are often aligned, in some general way, with efforts to open up the disci-pline in populist directions even if they themselves teach at elite institutions. There arecontradictions involved here worth remarking on by examining comparative cases, sinceCanadian sociology has produced very few public spokespeople for the discipline of thestature of the David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, Herbert Gans, Frances FoxPiven, Arlie Hochschild, William Julius Wilson, Richard Sennett, or Alan Wolfe despite thefact that the discipline is far less stratified (Posner, 2001; Royce, 1996; Wolfe, 1998). Theflatness of the Canadian educational system and the populist sensibility of the disciplinedamages Canadian public sociology. It is worth remembering that many of prominent pub-lic intellectual American sociologists were sustained in elite institutions such as Harvard,Columbia, or the University of Chicago.9 Empirical research on the publishing patterns ofAmerican sociologists show that book writing “public intellectuals” are more likely to emergeon the East and West coasts in the United States, often at elite institutions, while the Southand the Midwest and the land-grant institutions housed there tend to produce more techni-cally oriented, article—producing cultures (Wolfe, 1991). Without elite institutions andleadership in the discipline from accomplished critics of the mainstream, Canadian sociolo-gists are less likely to be able to go beyond efforts to establish professional status in tradi-tional ways, especially in a nation with a smaller book market (Hiller, 1981). The result ofthese various social processes in Canada is a discipline marked by the mediocrity thatTocqueville predicted would flow from democracy itself (Tocqueville, 1961). Going too farwith critiques of the ASA establishment and the dominance of the elite departments in thediscipline in the United States could lead to a similar unintended consequence south of theborder. This provides a warning worth reflecting on even as American sociologists continue,as they should, to push to open up the discipline to ideas outside the ASR/AJS establish-ment. Scholarly excellence is not, to be sure, an exclusive property of scholars at high statusinstitutions. But many American sociologists would find, I posit, that the only thing worsethan an American Sociological Association dominated by disciplinary elites from majoruniversities would be meetings without their presence.

The Romance of European Ideas: Finding the Right Balance

Raising the issue of the organizational health of the discipline in the ways I have hereruns the risk of arguing for an excessively narrow professionalism. There are reasons, ofcourse, to be skeptical of specialized professional sociology in the American mode. There isno question that the narrow technical nature of much of what might be called “dust bowl”empiricism in American sociology as well as the intellectual straightjacket of policy research,often pushes North American scholars to look to Europe for theoretical insights, perspec-tives and new ideas. This borrowing of European theory has a long history, of course, fromthe days when social Darwinist sociologists drew from Spencer, Parsons mined insightsfrom Durkheim and Weber, and C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner engaged the Marxistand Weberian traditions. The sociological imagination is created when scholars take risks,

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speculate beyond the data, and move beyond specialized journal articles to books and bigideas. From my perspective, some of the most interesting ideas in sociology come, as theexamples of David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, Alvin Gouldner, and Erich Fromm illustrate,when the American empirical tradition engages European critical theories in dialogue(McLaughlin, 1998; McLaughlin, 2001b).

Nonetheless, one can see in the Canadian example enormous dangers for the disciplinewhen new trends in European theory are brought into the discipline of sociology withoutadequate concern for the integrity and coherence of our own academic project and theinsistence on a genuine two-way dialogue between the humanities and the social sciences.Without a strong disciplinary vision, sociology’s openness can easily lead to us playing apurely derivative role in the university’s intellectual life, where our young scholar parrot thenewest catch phrases from “High Theory” in the humanities without a real attempt to linkup theory to research or to think critically and historically about the assumptions in thenewest academic fashion. When you combine these trends with the fact that a very largenumber of Canadian sociologists are engaged in a-theoretical policy research, you have arecipe for an institutional crisis for the discipline.

These negative consequences of the general “crisis of sociology” are further intensified, inthe Canadian case, by an historical colonial relationship to the British Empire. Canada, itshould be remembered, emerged as white settler colonies merged in 1867, to form theDominion of Canada. Lower Canada, what we now know as Quebec, emerged from thesettlement of the New World by a conservative French-speaking colony that has since evolvedinto the strongest bastion of social democracy in North America and a distinct French-speaking nation within a nation. English Upper Canada and New Brunswick and NovaScotia, in contrast, developed from loyalist communities who rejected the American Revo-lution preferring ties to colonial Britain rather than joining the forces of mass democracy ofthe thirteen colonies to their south. As a consequence of this history, Anglo-Canadian uni-versities have always had a British flavor to them, something that can be seen in terms offaculty hiring, university governance, and culture as well as the intellectual orientation ofCanadian institutions of higher education. In Quebec, in contrast, one can see, especiallyafter the 1960s, a strong French orientation, as Quebec nationalists looked to Europeanintellectual culture as a counter-weight to the English speaking hegemony of both Ameri-can and Anglo-Canadian universities (Brym, 2002; Cormier, 2002, 2004b; Eichler, 2002;Fournier, 2002; Helmes-Hayes, 2002; Ogmundson, 2002; Smith, 2002; Nock, 2002).

None of this is inherently a bad thing, since Quebec intellectual life brings a Europeanflavor into Canadian sociology and English intellectual life can help sustain a rich scholarlyculture in new nations. The homeland of empiricism, classical liberal political and eco-nomic thought, Fabian socialism and analytic philosophy, however, remains a relative back-water with regards to the discipline of sociology. Steve Fuller describes the United Kingdomas “the major nation with probably the weakest institutional tradition in the field” (Fuller,2000: 508). This has hurt the development of a strong sociological perspective in Canada,given the relatively high number of British trained faculty who teach in Canadian sociologydepartments.10 Historians of the discipline have long understood the influence of Englishscholars on the development of sociology in Canada has, in many ways, been negative (Hillerand Langlois, 2001; Hiller, 1982; Hiller, 1981; Hiller, 1979; Helmes-Hayes, 2002). AsHelmes-Hayes reminds us with reference to the early history of sociology in Canada, “fromthe early years of the century up until the thirties, scholars in traditional disciplines, manyschooled in England, either ignored sociology entirely or worked actively prevent its devel-opment” (sic) (Helmes-Hayes, 2002: 84). Helmes-Hayes, however, does not go far enough,


in my view, in linking the contemporary “Englishness” of Canadian sociology to some ofour institutional problems. Even as late as 1997, faculty in sociology departments withM.As and Ph.D. programs in Canada were ten times more likely to be trained in Britain thanfaculty at equivalent institutions in the United States (see Figures 1 and 2).13

This data shows that American sociology has not been as reliant on British scholars associology in English Canada. My point here is not that British trained scholars have notadded anything to Canadian intellectual life, an absurd proposition. Historically, however,British sociology is a weakly institutionalized discipline (Kumar, 1990; Abrams, 1968; Kent,1981). The contemporary British version of the discipline, moreover, has tended to make itspermeability and “openness” into a selling point to students, university administrators, andthe state. This particularly British “weakness as strength” approach to institutionalizing so-ciology has not disappeared from our disciplinary discussions, even in the United States(Lemert, 1995; Seidman, 1994; McLaughlin, 2001b) and has had an enormous influencein Anglo-Canadian sociology.

The danger of this strategy, as we have seen in Canada, is that the romance of European“high theory” takes us away from a sensible and institutionally sustainable “Mertonian”middle position combining philosophical/theoretical insight with empirical methods andrigor. Moreover, the “institutional logic” set in motion by lucrative policy research crowdsout scholarly and theoretical standards and the sociological imagination. This is the socio-logical origin of what I have called the “coming crisis of Anglo-Canadian sociology,” withan obvious debt to Alvin Gouldner (McLaughlin, forthcoming).

Sociology’s unique and enduring legacy and contribution to modern intellectual life partlyflows from the ways in which we have combined the European grand theory (starting withComte, Spencer, Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, and then Marx) with the organized skepti-

FIGURE 111

Faculty Ph.D. Training in Sociology Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities, 199712

Trained in Canada42%

Trained in the US35%

Trained in Britain11%

No PhD5%

Unknown1%

Trained in Rest of Europe

5%

Trained Rest of World1%

McLaughlin 91

cism of modern empirical methods. This is a delicate balancing act, however, for otherdisciplines in contemporary universities have tended to choose sides in the turf wars be-tween the two cultures of arts and sciences. No other discipline has been as successful associology at maintaining these distinct angles and windows into the analysis of the socialworld (Alford, 1998). Psychology and economics have chosen to link their fortunes to anarrow science model. History, anthropology, and literary studies, in contrast, have notdialogued with as much of the multivariate approach as sociology has with various interpre-tive and historical-comparative paradigms. And while cultural studies approaches are popu-lar, they have not yet succeeded in combining theoretical insight with careful research tradi-tions in the ways that the sociology of culture has done. Sociology as a discipline, for all ourinstitutional problems, stands at the very crossroads of some of the most interesting andimportant debates within our interdisciplinary scholarly communities.

The Canadian example, however, shows what can happen to the discipline of sociologywhen we refuse to confront these tensions directly, choosing the path of least resistance. Thediscipline in Canada runs the risk of becoming an informal alliance between cultural stud-ies/post-modern scholars, on the one hand, and a-theoretical policy researchers, criminolo-gists, health care researchers, and demographers on the other. What both these tendencieswithin the discipline share intellectually is a relative disinterest or even hostility to tradi-tional attempts by sociologists to combine theory-driven analysis with empirical methodsand research. The relative flatness of the higher education system in Canada created more“resource dependence” for the discipline, meaning that the Canadian federal government’sinterest in pushing academics toward applied areas plus the current trendiness of interdisci-plinary approaches and cultural studies poses a real threat to the core of the discipline ofsociology as we know it. American critics of the sociological mainstream who feel that the

FIGURE 2Faculty PhD. Training in Sociology Graduate Programs in United States Universities, 1997

No PhD2%

Unknown1%

Trained in Rest of World< 1%

Trained in Rest of Europe

1%

Trained in Britain1%

Trained in Canada< 1%

Trained in the US95%

14


undermining of sociology as it exists now could lead to a more intellectually innovative,exciting, and open intellectual climate might want to consider a visit to the Canadian soci-ology meetings one summer for a potentially eye-opening experience. There is good socialresearch done in Canada, but what you won’t hear enough of at our meetings, however, isquality empirical oriented theoretically driven sociology that could classify as belongingproudly and squarely in the tradition of the sociological imagination.

Rick Helmes Hayes’s essay on John Porter offers insights into the best way forward forCanadian sociology, although he does not spell out explicitly enough how Porter differsfrom sociology in English Canada today. Far too much of Canadian sociology has becomedominated by a knee-jerk anti-Americanism, leaving us vulnerable to falling uncritically inwith trends in the European-oriented critical humanities. Porter provides a lovely exampleof how we in Canada might find the right balance, combining as he did, an interest inCanadian society, British training, a commitment to an international comparative perspec-tive, theoretical ambition, and openness and a militantly-reasonable empirical orientationthat rejects simplistic anti-American or anti-modern platitudes. Moreover, while Porter wasa left-liberal C. Wright Mills-like figure in Canadian sociology, he shared with America’sSeymour Martin Lipset an unbending commitment to putting academic standards andintellectual integrity before political correctness (Helmes-Hayes, 2002). Canadian sociol-ogy, and even our Southern neighbors, have much to learn from Porter’s powerful example,even if one disagrees with his social democratic liberalism and are critical of some of thelimitations of his work.

Towards a Critical Sociology: Nationalism, Activism, and the Sociological Imagination

All is not lost for sociology, it is clear, for compared to other disciplines in today’s corpo-rate dominated-universities, we retain our potential for forging and sustaining a sociologicalimagination, a left-liberal critical sociology and an empirical orientation in the broad spiritof Canada’s John Porter. A major debilitating “origin myth” promoted by Canada scholarsabout our discipline, however, is the alleged vibrancy of the critical and left-wing traditionsnorth of the border. Canadian sociology has a very strong element of the political andcritical energy that could make the discipline an exciting place to be.15 The Canadianizationmovement in the 1970s, as Cormier reminds us, was an explicit project for maintaining theautonomy of Canadian social sciences and humanities relative to the influence of scholar-ship and disciplines in the United States (Cormier, 2002). This has left a legacy of a highlypolitical left academy in Canadian sociology, and the case has been made that feminism isparticularly strong in Canadian sociology (Brym with Fox, 1989; Clement, 2001; Eichler,2001; Eichler, 2002). It is thus probably no accident that Dorothy Smith’s influential femi-nist sociology was forged largely while she taught at the University of British Columbia andat the University of Toronto. Erving Goffman’s insights into the underside of Americansociety were created, it should be remembered, by a Canadian outsider to the culture heanalyzed with such brilliance.

There is a case to be made, then, for the innovative aspects of a relatively marginalizedsociology in Canada. And there is an argument for the value of the social movement orien-tation that has infused the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association from its ori-gins in the mid 1960s. Nonetheless, from my perspective the contributions to The AmericanSociologist issue on Canadian sociology penned by Margrit Eichler and Jeffrey Cormier didnot do enough to address some of the negative consequences of the highly politicized natureof professional life of sociology in Canada, an issue that remains alive in the ASA.

McLaughlin 93

Eichler argues that feminism has had more influence on sociology in Canada than in theUnited States (Eichler, 2002). Eichler’s account, however, it must be said, runs the risk ofcreating an “origin myth” about the formation of sociology in Canada promoted by its1970s era intellectual and professional establishment, a contemporary “old boys and oldgirls” network that replaced the American and British “old boys” network of the 1950s and1960s. Eichler’s claims for Canadian sociology’s uniquely feminist strengths, moreover, aremade at the expense of a distorted account of American sociology. One of the characteristicsof sociology as a discipline is its critical edge, so it is no wonder that both Canadian andAmerican scholars critique their own discipline strongly for not producing enough feministanalysis. At the same time, there are numerous rich empirical research and theoretical tradi-tions in American sociology inspired by scores of feminist and women scholars such as RoseCoser, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Arlie Hochschild, Frances Fox Piven, Joan Huber, JessieBernard, Barbara Reskin, Nancy Chodorow, among many others. Canadian sociologistssometime make the mistake of reading the numerous critiques of the missing feminist revo-lution in American sociology as evidence of the weakness of feminism in the discipline. Infact, the pervasive internal critique of mainstream sociology in the United States is evidenceof the strength of feminism in the discipline.

The case that Eichler makes for the strength of feminism in Canadian sociology, how-ever, relies on rather weak evidence. She presents the percentage of woman scholars whohave been president of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and the numberof women who have had their work discussed and their pictures in introductory textbooksin Canada. The problem with this data, of course, is that the presidents of the CSAA inCanada are rarely internationally accomplished scholars since the position here tends to bemore of an unpleasant task than a great honor, unlike in the ASA where it can be both, attimes, but is always, at least, the later (Brym, 2003). Moreover, Eichler’s comparison itself isquestionable, given the number of highly accomplished feminist scholars who have beenrecently been elected president of the American Sociological Association including BarbaraReskin, Jill Quandagio, Maureen Hallinan, and Cynthia Fuchs Epstein.

More importantly, the strength of a discipline’s contributions surely must be measuredby the intellectual contributions of its scholars at the cutting edge research frontier of thediscipline not by a count of administrative tasks undertaken or even honors given. From myperspective, the work published by the top feminist sociologists in the United States is farsuperior to the feminist sociology in Canada that Eichler valorizes.16 This is due to the fact,in my view, that feminist sociology in the United States has been far more involved incritical dialogue with quality mainstream research than has been the case in Canada andthus has done more to resist excessive emphasis on purely symbolic forms of disciplinarystatus such as pictures in introductory textbooks.

Dorothy Smith, for example, has clearly made contributions to scholarship and socio-logical theory, and thus is a favorite of Canadian nationalists who often, it must be said,conveniently ignore the fact that she was raised in Britain and trained in the United States.Despite the contributions of Smith’s own scholarship, it would be hard to argue that Smith’sstudents and followers have contributed to the development of a strong and vibrant socio-logical establishment in Canada that transforms mainstream research by producing first-rate scholarship comparable to the feminist scholarship coming out of the United Statestoday. The problem with the way that Smith has been received in Canada, in my view, isthat far too many of her students and followers accept her critique of mainstream Americansociology second-hand. A better training would come, it must be said, by getting deeplyimbedded in the theories and research of mainstream sociology itself, as Smith did at Berke-


ley in her remarkably mainstream organizational sociology dissertation (Smith, 1963). In-novation in sociology often comes from what I have described elsewhere as “optimally mar-ginal” thinkers, like C. Wright Mills, Alvin Gouldner, Erving Goffman, and Dorothy Smithherself (McLaughlin, 2001). These innovative thinkers, I would argue, develop critiques ofmainstream assumptions based on deep and careful knowledge of the mainstream not sim-plistic platitudes (McLaughlin, 2001). The “origin myth” about Canadian sociology pro-moted by Eichler damages Canadian sociology by encouraging young scholars to think thatradical innovative thought can come cheaply through rhetoric claims for originality andexaggerated political posturing. In contrast, my sense is that innovation generally does notemerge from thinkers who spend a lot of time talking about their intellectual courage andradicalism, but instead it comes, as Collins has emphasized, from the careful accumulationof knowledge and insights forged close to the center of intellectual innovation where net-works of intellectuals develop powerful sources of cultural capital and knowledge worthdialoguing with and learning from (Chambliss, 1993; Coser, 1965; Collins, 1998;McLaughlin, 2001). The Canadian feminism influenced by Dorothy Smith, from my expe-rience, spends far too much time focused on critiquing the errors of the mainstream andemphasizing grievances from the past. In contrast, American sociology has seen the emer-gence of a far more visionary and positive feminist vision for the discipline, as evidenced bysuch feminist Mertonians as Rose Coser and Cythnia Fuchs Epstein, numerous socialist-feminist theorists and the scores of feminist researchers and scholars whose work has beenincorporated and has transformed mainstream sociology in the United States since DorothySmith’s time at Berkeley in the 1960s.

Intellectual laziness is deadly for the discipline of sociology in Canada, and elsewhere,especially when it is combined with political correctness. While Jeffrey Cormier’s otherwiseexcellent history of activism and nationalism in the Canadian Sociology and AnthropologyAssociation is useful for providing information about the political activities of Canadiansociologists in the 1970s, he does not do enough, however, in sharply addressing the verynegative intellectual consequences that have flowed from the excessive professionalpoliticalization illustrated by the Canadian case (Cormier, 2002, 2004a, 2004b). Cormierreminds us that Canadian sociologists played a major role in the 1970s in getting the Cana-dian Federal Government to establish a “hire Canadians first” policy that helped make surethat Canadian universities taught about Canada and were not dominated by academicsfrom foreign countries, particularly the United States. English Canadian sociologists in the1970s and 1980s, more so than the scholars in other disciplines with the possible exceptionof English literature, were highly nationalistic, activist oriented (at least when it came toacademic hiring policy!) and militantly anti-American. Cormier is right to remind Ameri-can readers of the special needs of a relatively sparsely populated nation on the border of themost powerful cultural, intellectual, academic and military force in the twentieth century.He does not drop the other shoe, however, and ask questions about the long-term conse-quence of this activism and nationalism.

Cormier is right to stress the victories of the Canadian nationalism in the social sciencesand humanities. Canadian sociology programs today, for example, teach from textbooksthat include much original data and thoughtful analysis about Canadian society. This is amajor difference and a vast improvement from the days when the introduction to sociologyin Canada was a sociological analysis of an already culturally pervasive American society.And there have been improvements in Canadian Ph.D. programs in sociology over the last20 years, although the story throughout the country is mixed. Canadian sociology nowproduces some excellent talented young scholars, a point Cormier is evidence of himselfand can be seen by a quick read through the two major journalsThe Canadian Journal of

McLaughlin 95

Sociology and The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, as well as major Americanand international journals where the best young Canadians publish.

This is only part of the picture, however. As we discussed above, the Canadian sociologyassociation has serious problems (Brym, 2002). And as Richard Ogmundson has argued,there is much unfulfilled potential for an empirical oriented non-Marxist sociology in Canada(Ogmundson, 2002). Cormier’s excellent historical work on the social sciences in Canadarelies on interviews with the “founding” generation of Canadian sociology, a cohort of scholarsrightly proud of their accomplishments establishing the discipline in Canada. But mightthere not be a connection between the nationalistic activism on the part of Canadian soci-ologists in the 1970s, and the institutional crisis Canadian sociologists face in the early yearsof the twenty-first century? Canadian psychologists, economists, and even political scien-tists were not so focused on building a distinctively Canadian version of their respectivesocial sciences as were Canadian sociologists. The CSAA, Cormier reminds us, ran a nation-wide boycott of the sociology department at the University of Toronto (in recent years, themost American ASA-oriented department and along with McGill, the most prestigiousprogram in the country). While some of this activism was clearly necessarily in the 1960sand 1970s, Cormier does not ask whether the low intellectual standards, weak institutionalbasis, and declining participation we see in the professional life of Canadian sociology todayis somehow related to the legacy of anti-American and anti-intellectual nationalism pro-moted by the CSAA in the past. Ogmundson’s essay, as Byrm suggests, may go too far insuggesting the closing out of quality scholarship by Canadian radical scholars (Brym, 2002).Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the many militant political positions theCSAA took on issues of the day in the 1970s and 1980s and its openly radical politicalculture may have contributed to its institutional weakness today, an issue worth consideringfor the ASA as we debate the place of political resolutions in the American association.

In addition, Cormier’s claim that the “hire Canadians first policy” promoted by the CSAAin the 1970s remains the law of the land in Canada is dated. Since Cormier wrote his essay,there have been changes in Canadian immigration policy. Our universities are allowed toadvertise academic postings internationally at the same time as domestically, and to inter-view quality foreign candidates without going through the cumbersome bureaucratic andlegal process designed to discourage hiring non-Canadians. The consequence of these changesis that Canadian sociology programs can now hire the best candidates for jobs, and thusover time create graduate programs that can train scholars to compete with the best in theworld.17 It makes sense, I think, to make sure Canadian departments always retain a criticalmass of Canadian scholars. Moreover, I don’t think the discipline north of the border shouldautomatically hire the weaker graduate students at the top American programs. We shouldinstead focus on creating an international niche for Canadian sociology by hiring the bestscholars, including Canadian, international, and American candidates, who fit into ourpotential strengths as an innovative multi-method critical sociology. I would like to seeCanadian sociology emphasize hiring scholars who are strong in substantive sociology andavoid methodological narrowness and theoretical fashion. Be that as it may, Cormier doesnot say enough about how protectionist oriented self-interested political activity on the partof graduate students and faculty aligned with simplistic left-wing anti-Americanism dam-ages the health of the discipline and denies Canadian sociology access to scholars who canmove us forward. Moreover, a national association that runs a boycott against its academi-cally strongest program for no real strong reason, as the CSAA did in the 1970s, representsa discipline with a death wish. This kind of nationalist campaign legitimizes precisely thekind of anti-professionalism, self-interested careerism and radical posturing that has donesuch harm to Canadian sociology over the past decades.


My critique of left-wing nationalism in English Canadian sociology is different, I wantto stress, from the argument made in Irving Louis Horowitz’s The Decomposition of Sociology(1993). While Horowitz’s own scholarship is first-rate, and he makes many valuable pointsabout the state of our discipline today, Horowitz does not provide enough systematic evi-dence for many of his claims. And he goes too far, I feel, in blaming radical and criticalsociology for the larger institutional problems our discipline faces (Horowitz, 1993). Frommy perspective, debates about the future of sociology require the kind of multi-methodempirical evidence we demand in our substantive work as well as an agenda for a largercomparative approach rooted in the sociology of culture, knowledge, professions and orga-nizations that can move us beyond polarized polemics (McLaughlin, forthcoming). None-theless, the case of Canadian sociology does bring some issues about the possible “decompo-sition of sociology” out in the open.

Conclusion

The Canadian case shows what can happen when this critical edge of our disciplinaryculture is taken too far, at the expense of our discipline’s universalistic obligations to stu-dents, scholarship, and public intellectual life. Sociological excellence requires strong lead-ership from throughout the discipline including its elites, even as we insist that our journalsare open to a diversity of methods, theories, and research topics and we reject nepotism andexclusionary practices in hiring. Sociology, moreover, will always be strongest when we com-bine the best of European, and one day, world social theory with the empirical methodsAmerican scholars have done so much to refine during the twentieth century. And a trulycritical sociology that will survive into the twenty-first century will likely be, for the mostpart, left-wing and/or liberal and engaged, while remaining a discipline open to pure schol-arship and political conservatives. Thus we must always be vigilant against political correct-ness and dogmas of any kind, including uncritical and self-serving nationalism. The case ofCanadian sociology illustrates what happens when professionalization lags behindpoliticalization, a warning that proponents of a critical public sociology in the United Statesshould head.

The recent special issue of The American Sociologist went a long way towards encouragingan open discussion about the fate of our collective intellectual project between Americanand Canadian scholars, even if the articles did not address some of the issues I have raisedhere. And clearly far more work must be done in dialoguing with Sociology in Quebec.Hopefully we can continue these discussions as we debate “public sociologies” in San Fran-cisco and the “The Rising and Declining Significance of Sociology” in Philadelphia, andperhaps at the Canadian meetings. American sociologists, however, should resist the ten-dency to see Canadian sociology as some kind of left-wing social democratic sociologicalheaven. And while movement towards change in the American Sociological Association is,in my view, a good thing, American sociologists would benefit from thinking long and hardabout the lessons the Canadian case holds for thinking about the state of sociology today.For me, I would be careful to keep anti-elite populism in the discipline in its proper placeand would be vigilant against the excessive and uncritical following of the newest Europeantheoretical currents. Most importantly, the Canadian example suggests the need to insist ona pluralistic not dogmatic critical sociology that is analytic, empirically grounded, and wiselydistinguishes between the activism so necessary today from the proper role of a professionalsociological association. Moreover the Canadian case suggests we have work to do in think-ing comparatively and sociologically about the institutional basis for public sociologies.

McLaughlin 97

From my perspective, at least, the key question is what institutional arrangements wouldhelp us combine scholarly excellence, a critical edge and a real world relevance in the waysexemplified by the late Lewis Coser? Others may not share this vision for sociology, but myanalysis of the Canadian experience suggests that American sociologists should be carefulwhat they wish for during the coming debates about the future of the discipline.

Notes

It is not possible to thank here, all the individuals who made extensive comments and suggestions on themuch longer analysis that will be appearing in CJS. But the author would particularly like to thank ScottDavies, Brad Partington, Tony Puddlephatt, and Kyle Siler for their comments on this response to thespecial issue in The American Sociologist. The author may be reached at KTH 620, 1280 Main Street WestHamilton, Ontario Canada; [email protected].

1. There is a long tradition in sociological analysis that argues that insights come from the margins of powerand privilege. Strangers and nomads, from this perspective, can see society more clearly than those deeplyembedded in existing power relations and social structures (Coser, 1965; Coser, 1984; Kauppi, 1996;Galliher and Galliher, 1995; Seidman, 1994; McLaughlin, 1998). Contrary to this view on the socialorigins of creativity, there is another sociological tradition that emphasizes the creative potential thatcomes from links to core societal and institutional resources (Collins, 1998; Merton, 1949; Wolfe, 1998;Gieryn and Hirsh, 1983). Elsewhere I have argued that this longstanding debate is stale and irresolvableand have offered the concept of “optimal marginality” to suggest that there may be some forms andcombinations of social marginality which lead to insight, and others which lead to marginal ideas(McLaughlin, 2001). The case of Canadian sociology illustrates both possibilities.

2. Although certainly the international flavor of the summer 2004 Public Sociologies meeting bodes well forthe future of a globalized American sociology, as does the comparative perspectives promised for the 2005meetings.

3. I write as a Canadian who was trained in the United States and has deep roots in your nation but has beenteaching and living back home in Canada for the past eight years. In no way should this piece be seen as“representing” Canadian sociology, for my views on the discipline north of the border are controversialthere. For many Canadian scholars, my perspective is too uncritically “American” although others findthe analysis compelling and some find my analysis too generous towards Canadian “critical sociology.”This essay is simply my own personal viewpoint, informed by a sociological analysis. The larger essay“Canada’s Impossible Science” (which will be appearing in The Canadian Journal of Sociology) offers ideasregarding how this analysis could be “tested” with empirical data, a project I am engaged in at this time.Moreover, sociology in English–and French-speaking Canada generally have developed on two separatepaths, and my essay is really about sociology in the “rest of Canada” outside of Quebec, partly due to thisdivide in Canada and some of my own intellectual/linguistic limitations.

4. For a discussion of the concept of “origin myths” developed by intellectual historians, see McLaughlin,1999.

5. This analysis has clear Mertonian undertones, an interesting issue pointed out to me by one of the journal’sreviewers. My argument for the need to link theory, research, and public dialogue, moreover, is clearlyinfluenced by Alan Wolfe’s point that while Merton argued for sociology as a science, Merton’s own workhad public intellectual even literary flare (Wolfe, 1998). As a general rule, I would say that Canadiansociologists outside the sub-field of deviance make far too little use of Merton’s insights, being excessivelyinfluenced by 1970s polemics that link Merton to Parson and thus, in the analysis of that time, conserva-tism and outdated positivism. Nock gives insight into the flavor for the culture of the time (Nock, 2002).

6. A recent report in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail, gave figures for tuition in the Arts atCanadian universities. For the academic year 2003–2004, it cost $4,184 a year for full-time attendance atBrock, $4,133 at McMaster, $4,193 at Queens, $4,185 at the University of Toronto, and $4,840 at Trent.Remembering that this is Canadian dollars, if one does the math and compares what it would cost toattend Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, or Reed, one sees the issue of the flatness of the Canadian system in clearterms.

7. Right-wing critics of the politics of professors have all too often created a myth of tenured radicals withunreasonable politics, something clearly contradicted by scholars who have done empirical research onthe question (Hamilton and Hargens, 1993; Lipset, 1982; Nakhaie and Brym, 1999). Still, one sensesthat there is a silent majority of Canadian sociologists who see themselves as either liberals or even conser-


vatives, and view themselves as scholars not political activists. My sense is this group would like to see amore professional and less explicitly political Canadian sociology.

8. Sociology departments in Canada, it has to be said, do stress the traditional theories of Marx, Weber, andDurkheim more than most American programs do, but in a certain sense this plays into the fragmenta-tion of the discipline as young scholars have a choice between learning the traditional classics or new post-modern theories in graduate school, but neither of these traditions tend to be linked to empirical researchin the rest of their training.

9. My point here is not that public intellectual life can be sustained only at elite institutions, a positionchallenged expertly by Edward Royce’s thoughtful discussion of the public intellectual as well as my ownproud experience of being trained at the City University of New York, a public institution which housessome of the most articulate intellectual voices in the United States and has a long history of nurturingworld class public intellectuals (Royce, 1996). My point is that simplistic populism, as well as academicprofessionalism and specialization, are in tension with quality public intellectual life.

10. This borrowing of foreign ideas has gone on in American sociology in a more productive way than inCanadian sociology, for we have tended to borrow from the Brits not the Germans or the French, a recipefor a weak sociology given the institutional weakness of the discipline in Great Britain. If one is going tobe reliant on foreign ideas, it makes far more sense to draw from a sociology that has been more successfulin institutionalizing itself, as has been the case in Germany and France.

11. For the purposes of Figure 1 and Figure 2, the “Rest of Europe” is Europe outside of Britain; the “Rest ofWorld” is the world outside of North America and Europe. The Canadian data does include Quebecwhich accounts for a significant proportion of professors trained in the “Rest of Europe,” predominantlyfrom France. When Quebec is excluded from the results, faculty trained in the “Rest of Europe” dropsfrom 5% to 3%. Additionally, with Quebec excluded, British trained faculty rises to 12% from 11%.

12. I develop this argument about the English model for sociology at greater length in “Canada’s ImpossibleScience” forthcoming in CJS.

13. These two charts were developed using data from the 1997 Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociologypublished by the American Sociological Association which presents data on those sociology departmentsthat have either M.A. or Ph.D. programs. The data included retired and cross–appointed faculty, but datafor only full-time professors gives a similar result, so I decided to present the most complete data aspossible.

14. The actual number of Canadian trained professors teaching in U.S. graduate sociology graduate degree-granting programs was 18 in 1997.

15. My focus is on English Canada where the radical political economy tradition has played a more centralrole in the “core” of the discipline than generally has been the case for the Marxist and various Neo-Marxists sociologists in the United States (Clement, 2001). In Quebec, sociologists were deeply involvedin the reformist zeal that led to the Quiet Revolution and the emergence of Quebec nationalism in the1960s and 1970s (Fournier, 2002; Leroux, 2001). Sociology as a discipline in Quebec has played animportant role in defining nationalism and the distinctiveness of Quebec society for the province as awhole society outside academic circles (Fournier, 2001).

16. Brym is not wrong that there are some excellent quantitative feminist scholars in Canada, and manyfemale Canadian scholars have produced excellent historical, theoretical, and qualitative research (Brym,2002; Brym with Fox, 1989; Nock, 1993; Nock, 2001; Hiller, 2001; Stebbins, 2001). Overall, however,it would be hard to suggest that the quality of the feminist scholarship at the CSAA meetings and in thetwo major journals The Canadian Journal of Sociology and The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthro-pology compares favorably to what one sees and reads at the ASA meetings or in Social Problems, AmericanJournal of Sociology, etc.

17. Foreign scholars, including Americans, should thus apply for jobs in Canada if you are willing to relocateand adapt and learn something about a very different culture and nation. It is simply not the case thatCanadian universities will not hire quality foreign candidates. Just remember that it can’t hurt to learnsomething about Canadian society and sociology before you come on the interview!

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