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When the notion that Quebec is a distinct society within Canada became the chief object of discord during the Meech Lake constitutional debate, sociologists were offered a golden opportunity to participate in shaping the evolving understandings that Canadians have of their country. But this opportunity was not grasped. This paper evaluates some of the discursive conditions that have produced the apparent indifference of Anglo-Canadian sociologists to this most crucial of sociological questions as it applies to their own country: what is a society? Of particular interest are the general underconceptualization in sociology of "society," and the conceptual confusion that links "society" to "nation," "state," and "country." Canada's political-economic autonomy relative to the United States is quite limited, and Canadian "sense of society" is vague and is challenged from within.

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.

The article highlights issues related to sociology in Canada. The generally accepted view of how sociology is constituted as a science commits to procedures, which subsume the regional and local. Methods, such as the construction of typologies, are made use of in recovering from the distinctive local settings attributes, which can be arrayed conceptually in an abstract formal space. frameworks of "theory". The methodological procedures devised by sociologists and presented in standard introductory texts on "methods" are designed to constitute data in such a way that distinctive local and individual features and the characteristic ways in which social phenomena are embedded in and integral to a social organization of local settings become contingent and accidental properties which must be stripped away conceptually. Ethnographic research in sociology provides the endemic problems of its "generalizability." black males throughout the urban United States?" The work of ethnomethodologists seeks also its invariant practices, its forms of law-like statements, while repudiating the established methods of arriving at them.