Note on the Discipline/ Réflexion sur la discipline.

This article presents the author's comments on the paper Canada's Impossible Science: Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis in Anglo-Canadian Sociology. Do grand visions and preoccupations with how we ought to be doing our work have a place in the contemporary world of Anglo-Canadian sociology or should we avert our gaze from the flood of imperatives that we are implored to take seriously and just get on with it? Get on with the teaching? Get on with the scramble for resources and recognition? Get on with the construction of our world, the consensual observations that once on the page are us, the texts of sociology? Recognition and reputation do flow from publication and engaged teaching. That much we know or should know. So why not just do it and, thereby, perhaps, banish or, at least, reduce the innervating gloom of collective self-doubt that seems to be so much with us these days? So why not stop wringing our hands about our journals and simply fill their pages with worthy observations? So why not stop complaining about the quality of our meetings and take up the challenge of finding there those who can understand our specialized ways of talking and writing? McLaughlin provides us with plenty of reasons why not,