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This paper investigates Romanians’ immigration to Canada after the fall of the communist regime, focusing on the case of applicants under the ‘skilled workers and professionals’ category. The empirical study of Canadian immigration policy constitutes the ground for a critical analysis of the nature of the state and modalities of state power. Selecting candidates for immigration involves a refined politics of making subjects, whereby the state is ‘effected’ through disciplinary inscriptions on migrants and projects of the self, materialized in extraterritorial social spaces, and objectified in a form of governmentality over ‘external populations’. It also opens a space to explore the workings of the self in a globalized world. Rights to international mobility may generate not only hybrid sorts of legal subjects incompletely and imprecisely tied to two states, but also highly reflexive individuals, performatively enacting themselves as subjects of policies, discourses, and knowledges from positions of ontological and emotional liminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study of the Canadian Forces' (CF's) response to woman abuse in military families which was conducted using institutional ethnography feminist methodology. A 20-person multidisciplinary team conducted 126 semi-structured interviews in four Canadian provinces with: (1) present and former civilian female partners of CF members, who were survivors of abuse [64]; (2) regional civilian and CF social service providers, and CF supervisory personnel [52]; and (3) National Defence Headquarters program administrators and generals in Ottawa [10]. Analyzing these interviews enabled us to identify and elaborate on some of the military social relations in which the experiences of military spouses who are woman abuse survivors are embedded. This paper discusses the difficulties created for military spouses by geographical transfers and military housing neighbourhoods, and establishes the crucial role played by the chain of command in military organizations' responses to spouses who have been abused. The paper then shows how military leaders, especially those who supervise combat units, respond to woman abuse in ways that reflect their participation in the hypervigilance and unit cohesion features of military culture. The paper concludes by reflecting on Western militaries' responses to woman abuse in military families in light of their responses to the events of September 11, 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the experiences of young Canadian women working in Toronto and New York who have undertaken unpaid internships in the creative sector. Interviews focused on their internship experiences, ability to secure paid employment, knowledge of the legal status of unpaid internships, and familiarity with emergent activism against unpaid internships. Findings reinforce the class-based privilege of unpaid internships in the creative sector. Despite the economic precarity of unpaid internships, the young women articulated strong desires to find meaningful, secure, and paid employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores infant feeding practices and experiences of mothers in Canada and Norway, two countries where breastfeeding rates are relatively high. Based on interviews with 33 Canadian mothers and 27 Norwegian mothers, we also examine how mothers feel, think and talk about their infant feeding decisions and experiences, and examine similarities and divergences across their stories. Our findings reveal that infant feeding is very much organized according to the logic of the broader medical discourse, a finding which lends support to arguments that contemporary parenthood is characterized by a process of increasing medicalization. Our findings also reveal the existence of a broader culture of pressure, competition, judgement and surveillance regarding breastfeeding, suggesting that the high breastfeeding rates in these two countries are not merely a result of favourable structural conditions, but also of strong cultural expectations towards breastfeeding. We discuss our findings in connection with the broader argument that medical discourses and health professionals are becoming the primary authorities and moral gatekeepers of contemporary parenthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares paths to employment (job-finding) in prosperous cities and economically-stressed rural communities in Canada. Since the pioneering work of Mark Granovetter (1973; 1974 ), sociologists have investigated the role of social capital in job-finding (specifically, the use of strong and weak social ties to find out about employment opportunities). To date, however, there have been few direct comparisons of job-finding in urban and rural settings (see Lindsay et al., 2005 ; Wahba and Zenou, 2005 ). Using data from two major surveys and a qualitative interview project, we uncover several important differences in urban and rural paths to employment. First, we find that both strong and weak ties are used more frequently by rural residents to find a job, while city-dwellers rely more often on formal or impersonal means. Second, we find much stronger evidence of differentiation within rural regions. Long-time rural residents are much more likely to use strong and weak ties to find employment than are newcomers. However, rural residents who used weak ties as paths to employment have significantly lower incomes. None of these patterns are evident in the cities. Together, these findings lead us to conclude that job-finding in rural settings is strongly affected by constraints -- in the labour market and in social capital resources -- that are not present in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an historical overview of sociological studies of the corporate elite of Canada for the post-World War II period. It considers theories from books such as the 1965 "The Vertical Mosaic" by John Porter, the 1975 "The Canadian Corporate Elite" by Wallace Clement, and the 1981 "Canadian Capitalism" by Jorge Niosi. Topics explored include social relationships, capitalization, capitalists, intellectuals, and social classes. The impact of political neoliberalism and economic reform after 1979 on corporate structures is considered.

A chapter from the book "A New Sociology of Work?" is presented. It discusses developments concerning female employees in the Canadian health care system, including women who perform tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and laundering. It discusses the impact of for-profit strategies in the health care industry upon women employed in such tasks and a shifting definition from health care workers to ancillary service workers. It also discusses the shifting understanding of private and public spheres in relation to households, social political issues such as abortion and birth control, and women in nursing in Canada.

It is ironic that Canada should witness simultaneously the apparent renaissance of nationalism amongst her intellectuals and politicians and the inexorable eradication of the cultural differences exhibited by her various ethnic and regional groups which they parade in lip-service to the richness of Canada's cultural heritage. Occasionally the marginal group has responded by trying to remain distinctive. More frequently, though, it has sought the appearance of ever greater approximation to the centre and, thus, the denial of its marginality with the consequence that the margin's appearance of non-marginality must be bought at the cost of its cultural distinctiveness. The definition of identity is a social process because, of course, identity is always constructed by reference to others. The propagation of an identity is a presentation of self designed in accordance with one's expectations of how others will react and respond; it is frequently informed by strategic attempts to evoke desired responses in others.

The desire for more effective indicators of well-being is best reflected in the "social indicators movement" which began in the United States in the mid-sixties and has since spread to embrace Great Britain, Canada and Japan. The rapid expansion of interest in the development of social indicators has, not surprisingly, produced numerous problems of definition, measurement and integration which have not yet been resolved. Furthermore, the term "social indicator" has become devalued with increasingly more generous interpretations, so that even the most modest of statistical series have become so named. It has been suggested that the term should be restricted to those measures which can be related to a sociological model of some kind. Much of the past neglect of the importance and potential of the concept must be attributed to confusion over terminology and definitions. Researchers tended to work to their own definitions of standard of living, level of living, plane of living, satisfaction of consumption and norm of living, whilst in the course of time the problem has been compounded by the popular usage of "standard of living" and, more recently, of "quality of life" as terms synonymous with most of these concepts.

This article deals with a study discussing the role of national courses in the teaching and development of sociology. The study is based on data collected in 1971 from university departments across Canada in which sociology is taught. The article presents an empirical examination of the rapid and widespread increase in the past few years of university courses bearing the label "Canadian Society," the first having been introduced at Toronto in 1940. Various descriptions of this kind of course have been used such as an examination of Canadian society and its changing structure through the use of basic concepts, principles and methods of sociology. Its main characteristic is that it focuses on a general study of Canadian social structure as distinct from using Canadian data or examples in other sociology courses. One question which has been raised in regard to Canadian Society courses is the extent to which they are compatible with a nomothetic approach to social science. A number of possible reasons, including cross-cultural factors, are suggested for the inadequate sociological perspective of national courses; such as, nationalistic reactions to American influences on various Canadian institutions; educational values which stress the need for students to acquire a sound knowledge of their own society; theoretical developments in the discipline at large; and the increasing availability of Canadian social scientific data.

This essay focuses on the social structure of a Canadian pioneer town. The town of Schefferville is situated on the shores of Knob Lake in the heart of the vast peninsula of Quebec-Labrador. With the decision to exploit the vast iron ore reserves of this hitherto unknown area, the Iron Ore Co. of Canada laid plans for the construction of a complete town to house the labor force and their families. It is noted at the beginning of this essay that participation in the social life of the town is much more common, although such activity is restricted by the overwhelming preponderance of males. Consequently, the bunk-house and staff-house groups alike are essentially a shifting, unstable element, and for broadly the same reasons: they contribute little to the character of the social life of the town community.