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In response to calls for greater interdisciplinary involvement from the social sciences and humanities in the development, governance, and study of artificial intelligence systems, this paper presents one sociologist's view on the problem of algorithmic bias and the reproduction of societal bias. Discussions of bias in AI cover much of the same conceptual terrain that sociologists studying inequality have long understood using more specific terms and theories. Concerns over reproducing societal bias should be informed by an understanding of the ways that inequality is continually reproduced in society—processes that AI systems are either complicit in, or can be designed to disrupt and counter. The contrast presented here is between conservative and radical approaches to AI, with conservatism referring to dominant tendencies that reproduce and strengthen the status quo, while radical approaches work to disrupt systemic forms of inequality. The limitations of a conservative approach to racial bias are discussed through the specific example of biased criminal risk assessments and Indigenous overrepresentation in Canada's criminal justice system. This illustrates the dangers of treating racial bias as a generalizable problem and equality as a generalizable solution, emphasizing the importance of considering inequality in context. Societal issues can no longer be out of scope for AI and machine learning, given the impact of these systems on human lives. This requires engagement with a growing body of critical AI scholarship that goes beyond biased data to analyze structured ways of perpetuating inequality, opening up the possibility for interdisciplinary engagement and radical alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows analytically how (a) the long-run growth rate and (b) the long-run proportional distribution of an interregional population system with a time-homogeneous structural matrix are affected by small changes or errors in (a) the natural growth rates of individual regions and (b) the interregional migration rates. Furthermore, the analytic results are applied to an eight-region Canadian population system. Finally, it is claimed that the method introduced here can be easily applied to sensitivity analysis of both the intrinsic growth rate and the "stable" age-composition of the Leslie model with respect to changes in age-specific birth and survival rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces the articles featured in the spring 2002 issue of The American Sociologist. The half-dozen articles here, along with Brym's engaging introductory essay, help us regain a sense of sociology as an unfolding international movement and also of the distinctive experiences of sociologists in particular national contexts. Rather ironically, in light of the sweep of the paradigms and macro-level theories that are sociology's coin of the realm, there are strong parochial tendencies in the field. In the United States, for instance, many departments of sociology tend to relegate international and cross-cultural matters to anthropologists, and many textbook writers produce analyses that focus overwhelmingly on their home country. One consequence of such tendencies is to speak as though formulas that fit one context have a general or universal applicability. As the papers here inform us time and again, sociology in Canada has struggled with the Anglo-French division of society and culture, which has generated two separate and largely unengaged spheres, and has segregated even the respective social sciences. Meanwhile, Canadian sociologists have worked to develop a voice of their own that is not distorted by the influence of sociology produced in the United States or in Europe.

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This article presents a commentary on a paper by Robert A. Stebbins in a previous issue of The American Sociologist which provided an account of professional and amateur sociology in the U.S. The British organization, Mass Observation existed in a relatively nonintrusive society with (as compared to the U.S.) greater concern for one's own and other people's privacy. Canada and Great Britain may in this respect have more built-in defenses against the risks of some kinds of amateur sociology that the U.S. would have. However, according to the commenter, Stebbins already anticipates this objection by requiring amateurs to be supervised and to start with a certain amount of instruction and proper cautionary comments. By engaging primarily in the use of unobtrusive measures and observations, the amateur will avoid the risks of harm to which Stebbins is already sensitive. The commenter relates that one of the public areas in which he has encouraged such unobtrusive observations is in churches, where the observer in outward appearance is similar to the congregation and hence not seen as an intruder. According to him, he has had a fair amount of experience with undergraduate amateurs of the sort described.

Arthur K. Davis was President of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association in 1975–1976 and in 1995 received the association's Outstanding Contribution award. In Canada, he was particularly known for his article on “Canadian Society and History as Hinterland Versus Metropolis,” originally published in Ossenberg's anthology of 1971. This article was frequently cited from 1972–1994 and was reprinted a number of times. Davis was also known for his articles on Thorstein Veblen, which continue to receive citation. Davis' career merits careful study for at least two reasons. The first is that he was a Ph.D. product of the early Harvard sociology graduate program, which has received much less attention than it deserves from sociological historians (unlike the Chicago School). As such, Davis studied under of Talcott Parsons, Pitirim Sorokin, and Robert K. Merton. The second reason is that Davis' career clearly illustrates the usefulness of Robert W. Friedrichs' distinction between the priestly and prophetic roles that sociologists may fulfill. Davis' career started under the influence of a priestly orientation (as symbolized by his doctoral supervisor Talcott Parsons) and then gravitated to a prophetic stance as influenced by Pitirim Sorokin, Paul M. Sweezy, and, more distantly, by Marx and Veblen. Since this transition took place just when the Cold War was falling, his career reveals some of the pitfalls that await the prophetic sociologist in times that favor security and conservatism rather than activism and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features Canadian sociologist John Porter. Each year between 1956 and 1968 at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association they announced the winner of the MacIver Award, the honor given to the author of the book judged to be the most important work published during the previous year. In 1966, something happened at the announcement ceremony that had never occurred before and did not happen again for the duration of the award: it was given to a Canadian author for a book written about Canada. The author was John Porter of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. The book was The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Class and Power in Canada. John Porter went on to become Canada's most famous English-language sociologist and TVM became the most important and famous book in the history of Canadian sociology. John Arthur Porter was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1921, the second of three children of Arthur Porter, an accountant, and Ethel Cuffin, a former schoolteacher. Porter was a highly productive researcher who throughout his career focused his scholarly, political, and administrative attention on a handful of key questions. TVM is clearly the most famous and influential of the , but there were others as well: Occupational Prestige in Canada, Towards 2000, Does Money Matter?, the McInnis Lectures, Stations and Callings, and Ascription and Achievement.

In this article I focus on four major concerns in Canadian sociological analyses of the labour market: (1) the distribution of employment of varying quality among different groups; (2) aggregate trends in the quality of employment and the incidence of unemployment often associated with globalization and technological change; (3) the effects of the relative dependence of the economy on resource extraction; and (4) various comparisons of Canadian labour market performance with that of Sweden, usually to the disadvantage of the former. I argue that these concerns have generated useful research, to varying degrees, but have tended to produce needlessly pessimistic conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates have again resurfaced in Canada over the hiring of foreign academics to work in Canadian universities. Many are predicting a shortage of qualified Canadian graduates able to cope with the expected influx of echo generation students. In the face of such a crisis, some are calling for the elimination of the Canadians First policy now in place to limit the number of foreign academics taking jobs in Canada. This situation is not new. This article looks past traditional discussions of the Canadianization movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which tend to focus on epistemological issues, and examines it as a social movement. From this perspective, Canadian sociologists and anthropologists contributed significantly to the movement to Canadianization sociology and anthropology in Canada, as well as other disciplines. The hope here is that a proper historical understanding of the Canadianization movement, and its successes, will help us in evaluating possible solutions to the coming crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the sociological dimensions of the impact of feminism on Canadian sociology. Counter to the U.S. and Europe, sociology in Canada is still a young discipline. Hiller (1980) proposes a four-step periodization for understanding the development of Canadian sociology: first, a period of European transference, which ends about the time of World War 1. During the second period, which Hiller names the period of environmental adaptation (essentially the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s) sociology was taught in conjunction with economics and political science as part of an interdisciplinary approach. Hiller names the third period one of disciplinary differentiation and specialization (the late 1950s and the decade of the 1960s). The fourth period of consolidation, sarting in the 1970s, also involved the development of a truly Canadian sociology, stimulated and carried forward both by the Canadianization movement and the women's movement, which largely coincided timewise. In the middle to late 1960s the women's movement in Canada started to become a social force, kickstarted by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. In 1972, the first session ever on women took place in the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. It was organized by Marylee Stephenson, with three speakers: Lorna Marsden, Dorothy Smith, and Margrit Eichler.