On the Crisis in Canadian Sociology: Comment on McLaughlin

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 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.

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.