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Record W2022877554 · doi:10.1353/cjs.2006.0002

On the Crisis in Canadian Sociology: Comment on McLaughlin

2005· article· en· W2022877554 on OpenAlex
Douglas Baer

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Canadian Journal of Sociology · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicContemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociologyContext (archaeology)PoliticsSociology of disasterSocial scienceMedical sociologyLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Once again, sociological journals in the English-speaking liberal democracies have turned their attention to issues dealing with the role of the discipline and its future in the context of various forces, endogenous and exogenous, seen to be giving rise to pressures. In England, this has taken the form of various debates in the British Journal of Sociology and Sociology, including the discussion on the relationship between sociology, social policy and government (see Lauder et al., 2004; Johnson, 2004; Hammersley, 2004; Payne et al., 2004, 2005; May, 2005). In the United States, a debate dealing with a parallel issue regarding the connection between social policy, political advocacy and the discipline has taken place within the context of the discussion surrounding "public sociology(ies)" (see Burawoy, 2004, 2005; Brady, 2004; Nielson, 2004; Tittle, 2004).1 While the Canadian debate has indeed touched upon wider issues covering the relationships between sociology as a discipline, the changing environment of the university and the wider societal context within which the discipline operates (see, especially, Curtis and Weir, 2002), in its more recent versions the contributions have dealt heavily (Brym, 2002; McLaughlin,2005 ) or exclusively (Brym, 2003a, 2003b)2 with the role of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, declaring, among other [End Page 492] things, that the Association is in a profound crisis. McLaughlin attempts to broaden the focus by moving beyond the organizational dynamics of the CSAA into the wider social context of the discipline in Canada, which is a useful and important impulse, but draws in the end too heavily on the claim that the Association's demise is well at hand3 and then comes up a bit short on assessing the full range of explanations that might account for both a decline in CSAA membership during a specific period of time when membership levels dropped and for other problems which affect the discipline in Canada. CSAA Membership Decline: When, Where and How Much? The key issue is put dramatically by Figure 1 in Brym (2003a): "membership in the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association has declined despite a growing number of sociology and anthropology professors in the country" (2003a:411). The figure displays a positively sloped straight line for faculty numbers from the late 1970s through 2002, and a negatively sloped straight line for CSAA membership numbers throughout the same period.4 The idea that faculty numbers in sociology and anthropology increased in the 1990s will, of course, seem counter-intuitive, since, the 1990s seemed to represent a period of institutional retrenchment in the university systems of many provinces and since what few university resources were available for replacement or incremental faculty positions tended to go to the more prestigious and/or powerful disciplines identified by McLaughlin (2005:12) — the natural sciences, commerce, law, engineering and medical schools.5 The conventional wisdom — that the 1990s represented contraction and not expansion in Sociology, seems to be borne out by the numbers of job ads appearing in the two main publications used to advertise academic positions (see Table 1). These data suggest that, after 1991 ending in 1999, there was a reduced level of Canadian academic employment opportunity for Ph.D sociologists, even as the number of retirements was probably about the same if not higher during this period than it was in previous periods. [End Page 492] It is also the case that Figure 1 in Brym (2003) appears to include part-time (sessional) faculty.6 Thus, some part of the decline in Association membership can be attributed, simply, too the decline in the number of full-time employed Canadian sociologists during this period.7 As it turns out (see below) the end of the employment drought for new sociology PhDs corresponds almost exactly with the end of the decline in CSAA membership. McLaughlin does not comment on this, or include it in the set of explanations he examines. Click for larger view Table 1 Tenure...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.009
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.632
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0090.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.080
GPT teacher head0.340
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it