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Introduction Fishing has long attracted social scientists with a romantic streak in them. A considerable library of descriptive accounts of fishermen, fishing villages, the tasks and the trials of fishing attest to that. But social scientists studying the fisheries today are not reproducing these romantic accounts. This may be partly because the dilemmas currently facing fishermen are seemingly unresolvable, and the industry on both coasts is in crisis. Beyond the crisis in the fisheries, however, there has been a change in social science approaches to this and other industries. Researchers have replaced romanticism with class analyses, focussing now on the diverse economic interests of processors, banks, and petty commodity producers, and on the often contradictory policies of the federal government. These concerns are evident in this set of articles. Intriguing are the puzzles in this industry. Why, for example, is fishing still carried out primarily by independent fishermen in owner-operated vessels when in most other industries these small producers have been supplanted by corporate enterprise, and the workers have joined the wage labour force? How much weight should be attributed to the specific nature of the resource and particularly its migratory, mobile characteristic? On the West Coast the salmon fishery is an intensely competitive business. Divisions have developed between those fishermen who support the Union, those' who are members of the cooperatives, and those who belong to the Native Brotherhood; these are cross-cut by divisions associated with gear-types, regions, and ethnic groups. Given these divisions can we understand the industry through a simple class analysis? On the East Coast the divisions are more clearly between the large and the small, but this, as well, is theoretically puzzling. When are workers deemed to be workers, and when are they seen as the petite bourgeoisie? In class terms, how best do we understand the difference between small processors and large ones, not to mention small vessel owners and corporate trawler employees? Flanking the fishermen are the banks and the federal government which have not infrequently supplied funds and enacted policies that increase the divisions, increase the over-capacity of the fleet, lead to resource depletion, and prevent fishermen from acting in their own collective interests. Are these actions due to a remarkable stupidity, a general disinterest, state responses to larger capital interests beyond the small fishermen, or the vested interests of the bureaucracy in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans? The answers to these questions turn out to be contentious: as these papers demonstrate, researchers with shared understandings of political economy theory are .debating a number of issues. Clement argues, for example, that fishing has become industrialized, and simple commodity producers have become industrial workers. Not so, says Sinclair, who produces evidence of the expansion of domestic commodity production units in northwestern Newfoundland. Further, Clement argues that fishermen's cooperatives are formed to free fishermen from Journal ofCanadian Studies 3 the processors. Hayward argues that this motivation was of limited duration and contemporary cooperatives are more strongly motivated by desires to avoid the constraints of unions. While Clement concentrates on the capital-labour relations within the industry, McMullan argues that the focus needs to shift to capitalists outside the industry, and specifically to the banks ultimately backed by federal government grant, loan, and legislative arrangements. Fishermen receive most of the attention in these as in other papers. Fortunately women are beginning to ponder on the problems of the fisheries and they, at least, have noticed that the processing labour force, much more clearly subordinated and exploited than fishermen, consists primarily of women and minority ethnic group workers. Muszynski provides an historical account of this labour force in B.C. and of the union's role in both maintaining it and addressing its material conditions. On one issue there seems to be agreement among all of these writers: the federal government's policies, especially since 1968, have been disastrous. But there the agreement stops. Davis, Kasdan, and Barrett are of the opinion that government policies are biased towards the large, vertically integrated firms, but the data offered by Sinclair and McMullan, different in many other respects, suggest a more complex reality: a state which on the one hand has no...