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Using data from the Canadian General Social Survey (2008), this study considers the role of social networks in immigrants' earnings. Despite higher levels of education, immigrants continue to earn less than native-born Canadians. This paper shows that social network characteristics are associated with earnings net of the effects of human capital and visible minority status. Social networks are important for understanding immigrants' earnings both as a direct cause of employment disadvantages and as a force that exacerbates the disadvantages that immigrants face due to racial discrimination, a lack of proficiency in Canada's official languages, and/or discrepancies over foreign credentials. While most current data on immigrant networks is limited to specific ethnic groups, cities, and/or occupations, the present study contributes to scholarship by generalizing data to all immigrants in Canada. This study also expands the temporal scope by comparing immigrants who arrived in the 2000s, 1990s, and earlier. Future research and public policy should put greater emphasis on the role of social networks in the economic integration of new immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minority groups differ from one another, among other things, in the extent to which they are integrated into or apart from the societies to which they belong. The extent of this integration or apartness is reflected in the various ways in which the minorities differ from the rest of the population, such as in the effect of economic class upon voting. No minority group is ever completely integrated into its society, for complete integration is tantamount to the extinction of group identity. No minority group is ever completely apart, for the term "minority" implies the existence of a majority with which the minority forms a common society. The dimension of integration-apartness is related to but not identical with the dimension of assimilation. Assimilation refers to the replacement or modification of group characteristics as a consequence of out-group contacts. Integration refers to the extent a minority actually forms a part of the body politic of its society. Thus, German "non-Aryan" Christians were fully assimilated but, in the Third Reich, certainly not integrated into the German society. In general, the term "integration" is applicable at various levels of analysis. We talk of the integration of individuals into groupings, the integration of these groupings into further units, and the integration of these into larger units in turn. In the case of our study, individuals are more or less integrated into their respective minority groups, and these in turn are more or less integrated into their respective societies. We are concerned in this paper with developing a measure for the degree of integration of minority groups into their societies. The basic proposition of this paper is: The more apart a minority group is from its society, the more will it differ from that society as a whole in the effect of economic class upon voting. An analysis of the voting of two minorities in Central Europe illustrates the above proposition. This is followed by comments on minority group voting in the United States and Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of social class, occupational experiences, and a variety of stratification factors on the ranking of a set of important life goals. Based on a national sample of Canadians from 1977, the findings indicate modest class differences in the evaluation of four "self-actualization" values. Specifically, middle class respondents rank "self-development," "achievement," and "activism" as more important than do working class respondents. There are no significant differences on the fourth concern, "independence." Multi-variate analysis reveals that the class differences in values are wholly attributable to differences in occupational experiences and educational training in the two class groupings. These findings are consistent with Kohn's thesis of "class and conformity." Additional controls on a set of stratification factors—sex, income, age, and language group (English/French)—suggest almost no differences between dominant and subordinate groups in the ranking of the four values. Only age has a significant influence, with the young rating self-actualization as more important than the old. The implications of these results for the study of dominant values and ideology and for the relationship between social inequality and values are briefly considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health inequities in Canada are pervasive. Intersectional theory and novel quantitative methods can be used to understand health inequities. Drawing on a sample of adults from the 2015 and 2016 Canadian Community Health Survey, this study uses multilevel analysis individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA) to examine the intersectional effect of race, sex, income and immigration status on perceived health and perceived mental health. Small variance partition coefficients of the final models suggest that most of the variance across social strata is explained by the main effects for the four variables. Intersectional interaction effects for each social strata are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Editors ofThe Sociological Quarterlyinvited the author to reflect on how Canada and the USA may differ, particularly as the American Sociological Association is meeting in Canada in August 2017. This article argues that, while the USA and Canada are in many ways alike, the fundamental ‘social contract’, defined here as the obligation of the state to its citizens, differs in Canada from that in the USA. It also focuses on the emphasis on accommodation of cultural differences and trust in governance institutions that are strongly held dimensions of Canadian society. The analysis uses the perspective of “possessive individualism”, articulated first by Canadian political scientist C. B. MacPherson, as a guide to understand the way that individual rights versus individual responsibilities are often understood differently in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Explicitly aimed at understanding and controlling molecular and cellular processes at the root of senescence and biological aging, regenerative medicine aspires to artificially reproduce the biological processes that enable the body to regenerate itself. This no longer involves conserving the body's state of balance by combating disease, as in clinical medicine, but rather fighting degeneration itself. From stem cell research to gene therapy to the production of replacement tissues, regenerative medicine perfectly corresponds to the logic of biomedicalization specific to postmodern society. Based on a series of 18 interviews conducted with Canadian researchers and clinicians in the field of regenerative medicine, this article seeks to understand representations of the aging body among researchers in this field. Seen from a strictly negative angle, aging is assimilated by researchers to an inevitable catastrophe that nevertheless must be combated. More closely observing the theoretical model of regenerative biology and the types of treatments developed, it can be observed, however, that this medicine of the future does not target the elderly, but rather promises youth the ability to regenerate themselves to avoid aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the conditions under which interprofessional relations may be characterized by conflict and/or cooperation through a case study of the rise of a software engineering (SWE) profession in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Analysis of professional journal publications produced by the primary computing organizations in all three countries reveals that the development of a SWE profession in the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent, the United States, has been a collaborative project pursued by engineering and computing organizations. In contrast, the development of SWE in Canada has been characterized by intense interprofessional conflict. The investigation suggests that interprofessional conflict may be mitigated when professionalizing groups seeking to lay claim to the same jurisdiction are similar in terms of their organizational size, outlook, and regulatory status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Perrucci and Pilisuk community power study of a medium-sized midwestern U.S. city is replicated on a small Prairie Canadian resort town. The interorganizational basis for power, derived from overlapping executive memberships, is the perspective followed in both studies. Essentially the same results are found in both places. A well-defined elite structure exists capable of mobilizing interorganizational power resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An area of research in which sociologists and historians would seem to share a rather obvious concern is that of social change. In his presidential address before the joint meeting of the Canadian Historical and Canadian Political Science Association, S. D. Clark emphasized this. "We cannot become students of change," he said, "without becoming historians. It is only by looking at what has happened to societies of the past, and over time, that the sociologist can derive the data on which to build his principles of social change." That is to say that the study of social change requires recognition of processes in time and must deal, insofar as time past is involved, with evidence that is historical. The student of social change must become a historian and the historian, insofar as he is interested in understanding and interpreting general processes, must become a social scientist. When, however, one searches the literature for particular studies of historical social change, one's findings are meager indeed, especially if one's standards, theoretically and methodologically, are reflective of those of contemporary social science, and one's historiographical standards, of contemporary history. If, in addition, one is searching for social change studies of a particular national history, then the material is even more limited. For this reason I have expanded this review, which was originally concerned with the American nineteenth century only, to include two studies of English history, because these two studies include important theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of history and social change in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]