Prejudice and Pride: A Commentary on "Canada's Impossible Science"

For a work advocating historical-comparative sociology and empirically based explanations, McLaughlin's (2005) article predicting the coming crisis in Anglo-Canadian sociology is stunning in its lack of comparative evidence. It asserts that the USA is "the dominant global force in sociology today" (5) without presenting a shred of comparative evidence. That assertion might have been true a quarter of a century ago, but it ignores the tremendous recent development of sociology in other countries, of the European Sociological Association, of the International Sociological Association, etc. American sociology is big and bigness brings power, but the paper fails to present convincing evidence that the USA is the dominant global force in terms of quality publications. The American Sociological Association meetings are impressive in terms of the excellence of some presentations but others are characterized by sleep-inducing mediocrity, as is the case with other conferences. Those meetings are organized on the basis of intelligent practices (selection founded on complete papers not just abstracts) and rather dumb practices (the factory-farm approach of maximizing verbal output for input of time consumed on the program by having ten speakers presenting concurrently to ten round tables in the same room). The article declares that Britain "remains a relative backwater with regards to the discipline of sociology" (16), but only supports this putdown with hearsay and references to the pre-1945 and pre-1914 period. No evidence is presented documenting that the big three British journals (BJS, Sociology, Sociological Review) are of lesser quality than the big three American journals (ASR, AJS, SF). It is unacceptable to make an unsubstantiated slur of a nation's sociology as a "backwater," and then leave it to others to disprove. The author assesses dominance and backwater by simply dismissing from the discipline anything he does not like, thereby silencing the creative debate of ideas, impoverishing the discipline, and limiting sociology to an ultra-narrow orthodoxy.

The article asserts that "Canadian universities have a local and provincial feel to them" (11), that the University of Alberta "now has a very large cultural studies/literary feel to its theoretical orientation" (15), that "Anglo-Canadian universities have always had a British flavour to them" (16), and that the Canadian journal Studies in Political Economy "and its networks retain a sectarian feel" (21). One person's sense of feel or flavour does not constitute rigorous sociological documentation. The article's conjecture that the general explains the particular — that pan-Canadian characteristics of institutional flatness, of the important role of the state, and of anti-Americanism have led to weaknesses and crisis in the specific discipline of sociology and only there — is entirely unconvincing and can only be sustained by ad hoc add-ons.

The discussion of the "flat institutional structure of Canadian higher education" is an incoherent jumble of "flat" in terms of similar levels of institutional prestige, "flat" in terms of the same quality of research publications, and "flat" in terms of equal tuition fees, with no evidence presented to confirm that the three are closely related. If equal tuition fees leads to low-quality research, how did the University of Toronto ever become a "prestigious research-oriented university" when its tuition fees are no higher than those at Brock or Trent Universities (10)? McGill University must be much worse in research than Acadia University since its tuition fees are much lower. I can suggest a different answer to the question of the relationship between tuition fees and research quality: there is no relationship. Germany (Habermas, Luhmann, Beck) and France (Bourdieu, Foucault, Latour) are now among the leaders in the discipline of sociology, yet tuition fees in those two countries are vanishingly close to zero precisely because the state maintains its support of higher education instead of privatizing it. American high-tuition-fee, private universities have failed to produce contemporary sociologists of that caliber. For all their endowments and soaring tuition fees, where is the evidence that the sociological publications written at Ivy League universities are proportionately better than those coming out of other American universities?

I agree with McLaughlin that sociology has many...