CFP: CJS Special Issue: “Counting and Contemporary Governance”

Special Issue of The Canadian Journal of Sociology on: “Counting and Contemporary Governance”

Guest Editor:
Michael Haan, University of New Brunswick

In 1801, one of the first modern censuses in the western world was launched in the United Kingdom, motivated in part by Prime Minister Pitt's fear that Malthus's predictions about population outstripping resources signaled impending doom. At the time, only a full headcount could settle the score, helping to establish the practice of turning to numbers to solve an issue of governance. This link still exists today, which is why nearly every country counts its population.

More recently, Canada’s Conservative government stopped collecting what had previously been the mandatory long-form census data with a voluntary National Household Survey. Prime Minister Stephen Harper justified the decision as a move to increase individual liberty; detractors say that the loss of information will affect us all.

This move and the attendant political fallout has created a space for sociological reflection on the interplay between population data collection, modern governance and the politics of numbers.

Subject Coverage

Motivated by the abolishment of the long-form census, this special issue of Canadian Journal of Sociology invites contributions that address, but are not be limited to:
• What is the role of large-scale enumerations? Are they less important today than they used to be?
• Does abolishing one data collection exercise simply encourage other forms?  Do these other forms already exist?
• How does data collection limit governments? Does reliance on census data, for example, constrain governance?
• Can the Harper government's decision to abolish the long-form census be read alongside a re-negotiation between Canadians and their government? Does this signify a new social contract, or a fulfillment of the original one?
• What are the implications of the change to voluntary survey for Canadian sociology?
• What political factors motivated this change in policy?

Please note that the question of whether the shift to a voluntary survey in Canada is good or bad does not appear in the above list. Authors might inevitably touch on this question, but the purpose of this special issue is to provide a space for social scientists to use this development concerning the long-form to engage in a more reflexive dialog on how or whether data collection fits into the modern governmental episteme.

Notes for Prospective Authors

Papers for this special issue will be assessed in a two-step process. First, interested authors should submit an abstract to the guest editor for consideration. Only successful authors will be asked for a full manuscript. These papers should not have been previously published nor currently be under consideration for publication elsewhere, as they will undergo a peer-review process. An invitation to submit a full paper to CJS is not a guarantee of acceptance.

Important Dates

Abstracts are requested from interested parties by December 1, 2010, and the editor will then invite for a full paper with final manuscripts expected no later than: 1 July 2011

Editors and Notes

Please email (mhaan@unb.ca) or mail your abstracts to:
Michael Haan
135A Carleton Hall
Department of Sociology,
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton, NB E3B 5A3

Compte rendu: Vers la république des différences

Sophie Guérard de Latour, Vers la république des différences. Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2009. 313 p., 24 € ISBN 978-2-85816-935-1

Le livre de Sophie Guérard de Latour, extrait d’une thèse de philosophie politique (Université de Bordeaux III), bousculera certainement les termes du débat intellectuel en France. Il pourra aussi contribuer aux débats internationaux sur le multiculturalisme. La question est la suivante : comment défendre « la possibilité d’un multiculturalisme républicain » ? Dans cette discussion, l’auteure ne tarde pas à choisir son camp. … lire plus

Article on CCTV and Public Sociology

Coming soon in CJS 35, 3 (Summer 2010):
Dan Lett, Sean P. Hier, and Kevin Walby  “CCTV Surveillance and the Civic Conversation: A Study in Public Sociology”

The captivating idea of ‘public sociology’ has recently been debated across the social sciences. Although the debate has raised significant questions about the status of sociological knowledge production, insufficient attention has been devoted to thinking about how sociologists concretely enter into a civic conversation through the research process. Addressing this gap in the public sociology literature, we present partial findings from a Canada-wide investigation of how public-area streetscape video surveillance systems are implemented in various communities to think through some of the implications of actually doing public sociology. Data gleaned from focused group interviews in the City of Kelowna, British Columbia are presented to explore the challenges of facilitating a civic conversation about public policy on streetscape video surveillance. Read more

Article on Globalization and Labour Market Outcomes

in CJS 35, 3 (Summer 2010):
Heather Zhang and Michael R. Smith, “Exposure to Global Markets, Internal Labour Markets, and Worker Compensation: Evidence from Canadian Microdata”

Because of the fact that globalization seems, in aggregate, to be associated with rising inequality, much of the sociological literature treats the process very critically. Our results suggest a more nuanced approach. Prolonged exposure to export markets is associated with higher pay and both prolonged exposure to export markets and foreign ownership are associated with higher total compensation. Pay is substantially tied to productivity, probably through exposure to international best practices. At the same time, the presence of internal labour market traits is also associated with higher pay and higher total compensation. We conclude that it makes little sense to oppose productivity and power explanations of labour market outcomes; rather, they should be regarded as joint influences on compensation determination, consistent with the broad lesson of a "post" new structuralist sociology of labour markets. Read more

Article on Same-Sex Spouses

in CJS 35, 3 (Summer 2010):
Adam Isaiah Green, “QUEER UNIONS: Same-Sex Spouses Marrying Tradition And Innovation” 

Same-sex civil marriage is a focal point of debate among social conservatives, feminists, queer critics and lesbian and gay assimilationists. In this paper, I draw on in-depth interviews of thirty same-sex married spouses to explore how actual same-sex marriages relate to these debates. Among these spouses, civil marriage is perceived to provide significant legal, social and psychological resources that, in effect, consolidate the nuclear family and the institution of marriage. Yet, conversely, these spouses do not uniformly embrace traditional norms of marriage, but, rather, adopt a range of nontraditional norms and practices that, in effect, destabilize the traditional marital form. In sociological terms, however, their complexity is not surprising, as contemporary lesbians and gay men are dually socialized in the dialectic of a dominant “meaning-constitutive” tradition (Gross 2005) that valorizes (heterosexual) marriage and kinship, on the one hand, but a queer-meaning constitutive tradition that promotes sexual freedom and nontraditional gender relations, on the other. In this sense, one important sociological question for the future is the extent to which the increasing availability of same-sex marriage will transform the dialectic, eroding the structural conditions that underpin a distinctive queer meaning-constitutive tradition and, in turn, same-sex marital innovation. Read more

Review: Philippe Couton on Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora

Margarita A. Mooney, Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, 302 pp. $US 21.95 paper (978-0-520-26036-8), $US 55.00 hardcover (978-0-520-26034-4)

Faith Makes Us Live is the result of an ambitious, multisite ethnography of the Haitian Diaspora in Miami, Paris and Montreal. The author, whose Ph.D. dissertation led to this book, spoke with 150 Haitian expatriates in those three cities. The result is an original, richly detailed study of one the world’s great diasporas, and one that makes a clear, well-supported argument about the role of ethnic and mainstream religious institutions in the lives and adaptation of immigrants in three very different social settings. … Read more

Review: Andrew McKinnon on The Promise of Salvation

Martin Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion. Translated by Steven Rendall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 228 pp. $US 37.50 hardcover (978-0-226-71391-5)

General sociological theories of religion are uncommon; good general theories of religion, even rarer. This alone means that sociologists of religion are apt to be talking about Martin Riesebrodt’s most recent book for a very long time. The most recent previous attempt at such an ambitious undertaking was Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge’s A Theory of Religion in 1987 … Read more