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This essay argues that "expressions of life" of disabled people are both marginalized and nullified through geneticism. Underscoring the application of genetics is the continuum from liberal individualism to nostalgic populism. Drawing from the work of Judith Butler, the paper outlines an ableist matrix. Giorgio Agamben's observations about bio-politics—a distinction between the "bare life" and the "political life," with disabled people primarily associated with the former—denotes a restrictive humanism. How disabled people negotiate the privileging of political life over the bare life is illuminated through the concept of "normative shadows." The paper discusses how to affirm expressions of life of disabled people through the essay Pure Immanence: A Life by Gilles Deleuze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a study on the development of medical genetics as a medical specialism in the U.K. and Canada to reflect on how local and national contents affect specialty formation. The paper begins by supporting earlier findings in the literature that stress, first, technological innovations as driving specialty formation, and second, the domination of physicians in the division of medical labour. Beyond this, however, the paper explores the specific circumstances under which geneticists set about turning their work into a medical specialism based on a "genetics-based approach" to illness and how "medical genetics" as a specialism has been assessed and configured to fit national and regional health service requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops the Foucauldian conceptual framework of discursive formation to discuss the emergence of the Canadian ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of genetics and genomics) agenda. It explores the wider discursive ecology which has made possible the positioning of ELSI expertise as a legitimate modality for the governance of biotechnology. The paper critically evaluates the extent to which ELSI provides opportunities for Canadian society to participate in the governance of scientific knowledges by analyzing how "Canadians" are "included" in the activities of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee (CBAC). It concludes by highlighting some of the problems associated with the eclipse of politics by ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the Canadian literature on men who purchase sexual services and presents the results of a self-administered survey conducted in Greater Vancouver of 80 such men. The paper describes the general demographic characteristics of the sample and selected aspects of their sex-buying behavior. Because of heightened concern about the large number of street-level sex workers who have gone missing or been murdered, and in order to offer some reflection on the prohibitionist argument that violence in prostitution is ubiquitous, the paper examines the self-reported commission of violence against sex workers and other people. We also examine their experience of being victimized by sex workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the content of television programs is influenced by how their production is organized and regulated. The political-economic approach provides a useful framework to link television programs and the regulation of TV production within a single model, and to investigate their interrelationship. Two systems of TV regulation are described in this paper and their evolution is discussed. Data from in-depth qualitative interviews with Russian television industry insiders are used to examine the impact of changes in the regulation of television on the types and content of programs produced between 1990 and 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the impact of Quebec's $7/day child care program on an economically disadvantaged community near the Quebec/Ontario border, using qualitative interviews with mothers of children in the program and with child care workers, A pilot snowball sample of mothers and child care workers marks the first phase of a three-phase project in the community. This paper shows how investing in children through a universal child care initiative resonates through this economically hard-hit community, in essence producing a ripple effect through families and the community, and reciprocally back again to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motherhood is widely considered to be a watershed in the careers of professional women, particularly those working in male-dominated occupations. Building on the literature in the field of women and non-traditional work, this paper seeks to account for the critical significance of motherhood, either anticipated or actual, for women in engineering. The paper moves beyond more conventional work-family balance arguments in suggesting that women enter engineering not as women, but conceptually as men—a status that, as mothers, they may find difficult to maintain. The challenge for those who do become mothers, then, is to manage the tension of balancing two potentially incongruous identities—"mother" and "engineer." This view is explored empirically through interview data from 37 women trained as engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the ongoing revolution in the use of tattoos in North America, academic understandings of tattooing remain grounded in conceptions of "tattoo enthusiasts" as social misfits. In this paper, data from three years of participant observation with tattoo enthusiasts in Canada help critique preferred social-psychological interpretations of tattooing as irrational, "risk-taking behaviour" (see Carroll et al., 2002; Roberts and Ryan, 2002). Through the lens of figurational sociology (Elias, 1983; 1994; 1996), tattooing is interpreted in this paper as a pro-social and affectively regulated act of communication, rather than a pathological instance of self-injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The December 2003 issue of "The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology," presented six papers on negotiating boundaries in a globalizing world. Boundaries may shift in tangible ways, such as within national or international laws, policies and practices, just as they may take shape in purely ideological terms. Shifting boundaries can occur at the relatively micro level, such as in interpersonal interaction or within neighborhoods, or at much more macro levels, such as cultural patterns or in national and international domains. Gerardo Otero and Heidi Jugenitz looked at the changing boundaries from within nation-states. Their interest centers on indigenous peasant movements in Latin America at the start of the 21st century. Susan Frohlick, in her paper, took interest in how globalization results in transnational boundary negotiations within a national context. The paper presented by Marie-José Nadal concentrated on changes involving the negotiation of identities within national boundaries in a globalizing world. Gillian Creese and Edith Ngene Kambere discussed how the forces of globalization are reflected in the boundaries created by language. Laura Simich explored the settlement pattern negotiations between immigration officers implementing the policies of Canada as the host state and the more than 7,000 refugees who arrive every year.

Many erstwhile supporters of the New Democratic Party, particularly organized labour and poverty advocates, claimed that they were betrayed by NDP governments in Ontario and British Columbia in the 1990s. This paper considers this charge in light of the best available theoretical case for thinking that the NDP's policies could have been significantly more social democratic without leading to reduced private investment. The paper finds this alternative theoretical case—articulated by leading "globalization sceptics"—to be flawed in several ways, and so concludes that the NDP could not have served workers and the poor in these two provinces much better than they did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the knowledge society metaphor is an uncritical transposition from the knowledge economy. It examines three different approaches to the former. These include the idea of the well-informed citizen, the institutional arrangements and social expectations for being knowledgeable, and the role of the Internet in providing critical underpinnings of a knowledge society. All three approaches are found to be seriously deficient. The paper suggests that a knowledge-aversive culture may be a better metaphor, as the social processes creating a high degree of knowledge specialization in the workplace may serve to increase ignorance in the broader society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to examine the process whereby two researchers, situated very differently, analysed the data arising from a jointly conducted study. The roles of the Canadian and the Indonesian researcher were crucially important in both framing and analysing the data arising from a collaborative group narrative research project, carried out with a core group in the graduate program in Women's Studies at the University of Indonesia (Program Studi Kajian Wanita). In this paper we explore some of the ways in which our different positioning affected both our relationship as researchers and our analyses of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that the links between the North American academy's two defining trends over the past decade (namely, the culture wars and commodification) need to be explored more explicitly than has hitherto been done. Rather than providing a detailed empirical description of these developments, what is proposed is a theoretically driven critique of some of the Right's main positions by identifying their underlying socio-political interests and effects. All in all, the paper aims to demonstrate that the current, neo-liberal phase of academic restructuring is a deeply politicized and contested product of the narrowing of the scope of historical possibilities for the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore—in a broad and preliminary way—the nature and impacts of two recent federal initiatives related to university research, namely the creation of the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canada Research Chairs Program. After describing and highlighting key features of these initiatives, the paper examines how they are helping to reorganize social relations within and between universities, government, the private sector, and the general public. It also considers some implications of these changes for the various parties involved, as a means of informing the latter's discussions of, and responses to, these unique and significant developments in Canadian higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the uneasy and often conflicted relationship between an older woman's sense of self and her aging body. Using data from semi-structured interviews with 22 female participants aged 61 to 92 years, the paper examines the influence of the loss of perceived physical attractiveness and the deterioration of health and functional abilities on an older woman's sense of identity. The paper discusses the women's experience of the body as both mask and prison of the self and elucidates the challenge of the reflected image to a woman's sense of being youthful on the "inside." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thıs paper examines the representatıon of dısabılıty that ıs generated by, and supports, "people-fırst language." The paper first describes the ubıquitous formulation of disabled people as "just people." Second, the current ıdeology that stresses that disabled people are simply "people wıth dısabılitıes" ıs examıned ın one of its concrete manıfestations: a recent government document entıtled In Unıson: A Canadıan Approach to Disabılıty Issues By making use of Dorothy Smıth's concept that language ıs socıal organization, the author shows how dısabılıty is organızed ın this document as a medıcalızed and ındivıdual matter and, as such, takes shape as abnormal limıtatıon and lack of functıon that some people-four mıllıon Canadıans-"just happen to have." Finally, the paper concludes that people-first language is best understood as part of an ongoıng process that removes the possıbility of understandıng disabılity as a socıal, and thereby complex, polıtıcal phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent decade saw not only the rise of the importance of formal ethical research guidelines, but also witnessed the growing popularity and relevance of inductive research, better known as qualitative research and analysis. This paper addresses the social context of formal ethical review and its influence on qualitative research. Specifically, it suggests that when ethical review is based on the principles and epistemology of deductive research, it tends to erode or hamper the thrust and purpose of qualitative research. Using documents, formal research accounts, and the experiences of others and myself, the author indicates the lopsided nature of reviewing the ethics of research, which seems to work in favour of quantitative, formal hypotheses-driven research, to the serious disadvantage of qualitative research. The paper draws most heavily on evidence in Canada, the United States, and England, in the fields of anthropology, education, nursing, psychology and sociology The social processes underpinning researchethics review, the author avers, are similar to those associated with a moral panic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between educational and occupational choices, and decisions about having children, among a sample of university-educated women. The research described here attempts to interpret the finding, evident in a longitudinal panel study of Alberta university graduates as well as in the 1991 Census, that a higher proportion of women in traditional fields like education or nursing have children by their thirties than do graduates of more non-traditional fields. The paper reports the experiences of a sample of women as they deal with the possibility, or the reality, of motherhood in a variety of traditional and non-traditional workplaces. While acknowledging the probable effects of gender socialization both on occupational choices and on family intentions, the paper suggests that the organization of work also materially affects reproductive decision making.

This paper introduces and contextualises the collection of papers that constitute the special issue on organizational crisis. In contradiction to mainstream notions of organizational crisis as a change that threatens the existence, growth or profitability of an organization, the term is here defined as the widespread existence of organizational processes that routinely reproduce ethnocentric, gendered, and other anti-human practices that continually recreate organizational environments as (social) psychologically damaging sites of human interaction. Pointing to the persistence of organizational realities and the relative absence of alternative theories of organizing, the paper outlines the contours of a radical theory of organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is motivated by the discrepancy between poll results revealing high levels of environmental concern and the minimalist actions adopted by most people. Specifically, it asks why the recycling bandwagon did not generalize to other behaviours? It addresses these questions by investigating the interpretive packages used by would-be agenda-setters to frame individual lifestyle changes. The results reveal a stunted discourse that fatally undermines the environmental project. The analytic task of the paper is to explain the content and structure of this discourse by reference to the interests and actions of both large and small actors. Consistent with the concept of distorted consumption, much of this discourse can be attributed to the mobilization of bias by large actors. Nevertheless, the results for the small steps package are more readily ascribed to "consumer authority" and indicate that the relative power of each type of actor may have shifted over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the relevance of various representations of ruralism/urbanism in Marx, Tonnies, and Weber as these pertain to the current literature on the issue of reflexivity in social science. Acknowledging the linguistic turn in human science inquiry, the re-examination of this discourse does not attempt to develop an "essentialist" definition of rurality. Rather the analysis is concerned with the meaning of the attempts by Marx, Tonnies, and Weber to develop a concept of rurality which involves teasing out the way negations and oppositions operate in their texts. The paper argues that the rural-urban discourse is structured by a modernist interest in engaging otherness and questioning limits. It also shows the difficulty a modernist consciousness has with preserving a sense of the very otherness it needs to engage. Several Canadian studies, which draw on the rural/urban distinction are cited to illustrate the field's conceptual predicament. The paper argues that part of the problem which modernity has with otherness (in this case the otherness of the rural) lies in the scientific requirement that, by virtue of a commitment to objectivity, reflexivity be excluded from the process of inquiry. Reflexivity, as intrinsic and necessary to the process of human science inquiry, is therefore both a topic and a resource for the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents sociologist Bonnie Fox's comments on author's paper "Family Study in Canada." The paper was about historical change. It questioned how an area of Canadian life that figured so large in the initial sociological enterprise in Canada could later become peripheral to concerns of the few sociologists who ultimately decide which papers are published in the official journal, which topics deserve special issues of that journal. Most texts try to present the "state of the art" at the time of writing. The textbook remains the only place where knowledge in the field is codified and legitimated. It was precisely because most Canadian family sociology textbooks attempt to catalogue all the knowledge in the field that they seemed entirely appropriate for the purpose of establishing how the field has been constructed through the 1980s. Fox's sketch goes a little way toward including a few names of the many Canadian scholars who have made important contributions to the field but whose identities and ideas.

Based on an analysis of in-depth interview data from 212 activists in a variety of social movements, this paper considers the way in which diverse movements' discourses frame political issues. After identifying primary injustice frames and social visions articulated by sample respondents, the authors assess the plausibility of a cross-movement unity based on shared "master frames," i.e., common understandings of injustice and a common social vision. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of their analysis for the viability of counter-hegemonic politics and for theorizations of contemporary social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically examines the assumptions of the advocates of "globalization" and develops an alternative that is the polar opposite. The first half of the paper challenges the following assumptions about "globalization": that national sovereignty is eroding for all countries; that the level of transnational ownership is higher now than in the past; that "globalization" has been the inevitable result of technological change; that democracy is strengthened by global economic liberalization. The second half of the paper examines the prospects for the creation of democratic alternatives to globalization in old and new social movements. Socially controlled investment funds that have "location commitment" to communities are seen as an alternative to the globalization vision of transnational corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current analyses of social movements in Canada focus primarily on the internal methods by which state hegemonic practices are challenged in an attempt to transform the relations of power. As a result, little attention is given to the methods by which the state increasingly constrains and channels social movements into particular directions Chat are crucial to the direction and ultimate success, or damise, of social movements. This paper looks atone way in which the state now intervenes to pre-empt antagonistic groups that have the potential to become full social movements, by co-opting them into little more than interest groups. Specifically, this paper attempts to show how the state successfully prevented a potential social movement on Prince Edward Island from reaching fruition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the perceptions of the employees, the media and the local community regarding the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The legacy of nuclear waste from the Cold War is a global problem emerging in local contexts. This paper examines this problem from the perspective of the social identities of those who participated in the first ten years of production activities at the Hanford Site (1943-1953) and stayed to live in the locality. The issue of nuclear waste, specifically the transition to nuclear waste cleanup, is explored by means of life-histories, In particular, the paper explores the decline of the "culture of secrecy" in the locality in terms of the problems and opportunities it represents in the interpretation of the past and the present. The paper argues that this transition is particularly significant for those who participated in the construction of the Hanford Site. The analysis presented in the paper suggests that the relationship between self and locality is tightly connected to the perceived role of the Hanford Site as a peacekeeper since World War II.

The article argues that attitude is an invalid predictor for behavior in the issue of environmental protection. This paper contends that the environment is a domain in which attitudes do not predict behaviors very well. After reviewing evidence of low association, the author argues that the findings are not a result of poor methodology. Rather, the environment is a synthetic macro-category that does not fulfil any of the three criteria that are necessary for strong associations between attitudes and behavior. The paper goes on to argue that the attitude-behavior model misconceives the social structural basis of most environmental impacts and should be replaced with a more macro approach that focuses on collective actions. To this end, the author reconceptualizes environmental public opinion so that its potential impact on political debates can be addressed. With the amount of research devoted to environmental attitudes and attitude change, one might expect that these would be modestly if not strongly related to behavior.

This paper concerns the case study in sociology, and in the social sciences in general. The classical definition attributed to the case study is examined here by recalling the methodological conflict in sociology, marked by a rift between qualitative and quantitative methods, and by a retrospective look at the well-known case studies that American researchers devoted to French Canada (or Quebec), more particularly to its rural culture whose transformation relates to the 'meeting of two worlds.' The criticism levelled at these case studies are examined, especially those concerning their presumed lack of representativeness and objectivity. This lack was invoked without these terms being really stated or clearly determined. In this article, objectivity is defined as being the detailed account of the methodological strategies and operations guiding the approach to an object of investigation. Moreover, a distinction is made between statistical representativeness and sociological representativeness which best determines the generalization value of the case study. Finally, while this approach is considered as a study, or even as descriptive theory, this paper shows that description proves essential in the definition of explanatory theories. The example of the case study approach to the French-language economy in Quebec is presented in order to re-examine, in strictly methodological terms, all the points raised in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic, published in 1965, is generally regarded as the first comprehensive study of Canada's national class structure. This paper makes the (qualified) argument that it is Leonard Marsh's little-known volume, Canadians In and Out of Work: A Survey of Economic Classes and their Relation to the Labour Market, published in 1940, that deserves this mark of distinction. The paper also provides a brief 'sociology of sociology' type of explanation for the difference in the receptions accorded the two volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the connection between labour 'flexibility' and the cultural construction of work. It argues that while flexibility has always been a feature of capitalism, the gendered nature of that flexibility has been overlooked both historically and in contemporary discourse. The clothing industry has a long history of utilizing a flexible workforce through subcontracting and homework. Using an ethnographic case study of these forms of work in the clothing industry in Ontario, this paper demonstrates how flexibility is implemented and experienced empirically, and raises some questions for further consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of prejudice, ethnocentrism, economic conservatism, perceived conflict of group interests and perceived personal threat in shaping Canadians' views on three different measures of preferences for government policy in the aboriginal affairs field. Those dependent variables are: support for self-government, support for special status, and level of priority attached to Native issues. Multiple regression analysis and LISREL techniques are applied to data from a 1986 national random sample (N = 1834). The main findings are that: 1/a moderate to large proportion of the variation in non-aboriginal responses to aboriginal issues can be explained by three factors - prejudice, economic conservatism, and perceived conflict of group interests; 2/ prejudice and perceived confiict interact strongly in influencing non-aborigineil Canadians' responses; 3/ ethnocentrism has a negligible to minor influence; and 4/ objective indicators (region, family SES and age) serving as proxies for perceived personal threat have only minor net effects on how Canadians respond to aboriginal issues. The paper concludes with comments on the relevance of the findings for aboriginal political leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an analysis of the five major Freilichtmuseen in Austria as visual ideologies of the country's rural past. The analysis focusses on the museum setting in the rural landscape, the assembly of structures into regional clusters and the presentation of the individual buildings, which together are argued to convey an unrepresentative and idealized image of traditional rural existence. The paper then shows that the range of visitor interpretations of this image is additionally constrained by the visual and textual material in the museum publications and by the omission of contextual information that would contradict the official message. In conclusion the Austrian pattern is compared with the approaches taken in German, Japanese and Korean museums to show how rural heritage conservation may serve different ideological objectives yet remain an appropriated element in the hegemonic definitions of social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arguments of this paper are primarily methodological: that distinguishing characteristics of a group can be identified through an analysis of its social control activities; and that an examination of a group's control behaviours should begin with a study of its culture, with special attention to its central problematic. Elements within the culture of a group contain important sources of behavioural control and contribute to the nature of the social order within that group. It is within the culture that normal sanctions, and limitations upon sanctions are either inferred or are explicitly articulated. The mode of analysis is illustrated through the study of the culture of the La Leche League, a self-help organization for women who want to breastfeed their babies. The paper concludes that the League's success in encouraging its members to adapt a lifestyle with substantial costs can be attributed to some important characteristics of the content of its central problem and its articulation with other aspects of the culture. The data analyzed come from La Leche League publications; participant observation at League meetings; and interviews with League members. The research site is Ottawa, Ontario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Division of classes by sexes and sectors (capitalist goods and services versus the state) reveals different focal points in five advanced capitalist societies: the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Finland, Using data from the Comparative Class Structure Project, this paper offers a 'minimalist' set of class categories (capitalist/executive, old middle class, new middle class and worker) based upon commanding the means of production and the labour of power of others. The paper emphasizes the importance of distinguishing classes by sex. The results report on how men and women distribute in the working and new middle classes over sectors in the five nations, revealing a strong Nordic/North American difference. Some implications for the strength of political blocks for men and women in these classes, sectors and nations are tentatively presented. While Nordic working and new middle class women have a solid base of strength in the state sector, North American women are concentrated in the much weaker capitalist service sector. Men continue to dominate the capitalist goods sector for the working class but for the new middle class men there is a Nordic/North American split between their respective strengths, with the Nordic new middle class stronger in the state sector and the North American equivalents stronger in the capitalist sector. These patterns suggest different national bases for alliances in class politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary crisis in agriculture and rural life has been paralleled by a crisis in critical thinking and research: analysis informed by the commitment to a more rational, democratic and egalitarian society. Political economy, the currently dominant critical paradigm, has made important contributions to the identification and analysis of the economic mechanisms through which social crisis develops. But it has by and large failed to probe both the ways in which crisis is actually experienced by people enduring it and the real possibilities for change that a crisis situation might offer. This failure stems both from the nature of the theoretical assumptions which inform political economy and the manner in which political economists deploy methods of survey research in their empirical work. Using both the resources of social theory and the results of empirical, primary research, this paper attempts to suggest new directions for critical research into rural life. It argues that this research should adopt a more explicitly hermeneutical and phenomenological focus which should put the perceptions, self-understandings and activities of rural people themselves, particularly as they strive to preserve their communities against outside forces, more fully at the centre of analysis. No longer should it be assumed that researchers and those studied must remain separate if research is to be truly scholarly and scientific. The paper addresses some possible theoretical, empirical and historical implications of this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper joins structuration theory and power-control theory to explain gender differences in vulnerability to crime and corresponding differences in what we call the search for deviant role exits, including thoughts about leaving home and suicide. The joining of these theories focusses attention on a duality of structure in which mothers and daughters are both mediums and outcomes of domestic social control, and on an implicit patriarchal social contract in which the freeness of women to take risks in effect is exchanged for a reduced vulnerability to criminal harm. An Analysis of data gathered from adolescents and their mothers demonstrates that the same domestic controls that reduce female vulnerability to crime, and that help to reproduce patriarchal family structures, also act to repress a search for deviant role exits from these family structures. Because of their power to socially reproduce the domestic control of women, patriarchal family structures may be more susceptible to change from without than within. This paper offers a new perspective on gender differences in distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the micro and macro link in studying transitional economy by examining how entrepreneurs mobilize their personal social networks embedded in various institutions to secure business resources. The results show that, by and large, network members working in government/party agencies play an essential role in obtaining important resources, such as those for government contact and market information/funding. The results also show that entrepreneurs utilize different members of their networks for different types of resources. Implications to the study of networks and transitional economy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines rank placement of Canadian professors based on two surveys conducted in 1987 and 2000. Five hypotheses are pursued: a) publication, experience and possession of Ph.D. are the main ingredients of placement in ranks; b) males, Whites and those born in Canada are advantaged in rank placement; c) women and visible minorities have been less disadvantaged in recent years; d) the interaction of achievement and ascription favours Whites, males and those born in Canada, but less so for the first two groups in recent years; and finally e) such interactions favour professors in the natural sciences more than in other disciplines. Results support (a) and (b) but are mixed regarding (c) and (d). They do not support (e). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the cultural construction of the thrifty gene theory and its role in the geneticization of diabetes among Aboriginal peoples. Currently, the thrifty gene reifies racial categories of biological risk by matching neo-colonial ideologies of "problematic races" with disease "epidemics." Drawing upon decolonizing critiques of science, the thrifty gene is denaturalized by challenging the assumptions of genetic homogeneity among Aboriginal peoples and the validity of comparative racial groups. The thrifty gene should not be considered a genetic marker, but rather imagined as a complex character in an evolutionary drama about genes, race and society beginning with a story of Raven Trickster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the replacement of Caribbean workers by Mexicans in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, highlighting the role of racialized understandings in implementing foreign worker programs. It argues that a process of racialization underpins the discourses employed by Ontario growers in search of the most hardworking, reliable and flexible labour force. Sometimes grower discourses manifest a crude racism, casting Caribbean men as hypersexualized Black subjects who pose a risk to Canadian women, while other times these racialized assumptions are framed in terms of physical and/or psychic dispositions to the production of certain crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Canada as an example, we examine the extent to which immigrants take on the ethnic identity of their host country, thus displaying either an assimilated, integrated, or neither assimilated nor integrated ethnic identity. We pay particular attention to the impact of economic integration, years since migration, ethnic origin and visible minority status on ethnic identity. Surprisingly, our findings reveal that indicators of economic success such as employment status, occupation and prior earnings do not have an impact on whether immigrants will assume the identity of their host society. The statistical analysis for this paper is situated within the existing acculturation literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of one of Canada's first feminist electronic discussion lists, PAR-L (Policy, Action, Research List). Based largely on the results of an on-line survey of PAR-L subscribers, we show that, even among feminists sensitive to issues of diversity and equality, power differentials related to gender, age, language and professional affiliation influence on-line interaction. While we acknowledge that the co-presence of differences in a shared space creates tensions, we argue that it also has the potential to enhance democratic communication and deepen mutual understanding within the women's movement, leading to a greater sense of connectedness and well-being among participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the rise in Canadian public policy interest in the concept of social capital, and suggests that the concept holds some promise, along with considerable problems, for women. It elucidates the parameters of the concept of social capital and attempts to deepen it with critical feminist political economy questions. It begins the crucial task of gendering social capital so that policy outcomes in the Canadian context do not increase the burden of social and caring work onto already overburdened groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several strategies have been employed either implicitly or explicitly to improve the remuneration levels of largely female care providers; these tactics include increasing entry-to-practice credentials; organizing and unionizing; seeking pay equity considerations; and seeking public funding for their services. While many scholars have investigated the process and effects of these strategies for nursing, there has been very little similar research conducted concerning other care providers. In this paper, we undertake a comparative examination of the effectiveness of the four aforementioned strategies in achieving appropriate levels of remuneration within nursing, midwifery and child care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on interviews with 60 sex workers in three Maritime cities. We found that sex workers often made careful decisions between the economic choices—including minimum wage work or welfare—and between indoor or street-based sex work. Patterns of resistance to dominant economic structures that are comparable to other workers in the Maritimes emerged from the interviews. Understanding sex workers as resistant workers allows us to see that many of their concerns revolve around maintaining and/or increasing their independence as workers, their control over the pace and price of their labor, and the conditions of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interplay of power relations in the strip club. Through drawing parallels with the service industry, it explores the strategies strip club workers engage in to enhance their autonomy on the job and the resources they use to facilitate acts of resistance. The "informal economy of favors" (Bruckert, 2002) that develops, through interconnections between the co-operative activities engaged in by workers, serves to create a more supportive work environment and to decrease the inherent uncertainties of the job. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the port city of Vancouver, British Columbia, this paper examines attempts by striptease dancers to agitate for union membership and collective bargaining during the industry's ''golden era'' from 1965 to 1980. Interviews with retired dancers, club owners, and booking agents reveal five central stumbling blocks to dancers' union formation: a) the small and transient work force; b) competition among dancers as independent contractors; c) working condition in a quasi-criminalized, stigmatized business; d) the resolute efforts of club owners and agents to stymie agitation and punish ''ringleaders'': and e) barriers to organizing intrinsic to provincial labor law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares media portrayals of people who work in the sex industry with those workers self-reports of their personal backgrounds and experiences of what they do for a living. Our aim is to first, gauge the empirical distance between media depictions and workers' lived reality, and second, to understand how the media contributes to constructing, reproducing and deepening the social stigmas associated with working in the sex industry. We argue that pulling apart the historical and spacial variability of these stigmas and explicating their roots in the meaning-making activities of media authors and authorities is a crucial step towards understanding their social construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of the distinctiveness of Canadian research methods by looking first at the broad pattern of methods used in empirical articles published in leading Canadian journals from the 1960s, how these have changed over time, and how they have differed between Francophone and Anglophone Canada, Issues of U.S. influence raised by the earlier Canadianization debate are also addressed. It is found that, for the more recent period, gender differences that cut across these "national" divisions have been the more salient. The net effect is that the total Canadian pattern has something in common with that recorded for other countries, although at a more detailed level there are specifically Canadian or Quebecois effects. Reasons for the similarities and differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]