Showing papers in "Canadian Journal of Sociology in 2018"

Measles, Moral Regulation and the Social Construction of Risk: Media Narratives of “Anti-Vaxxers” and the 2015 Disneyland Outbreak

Abstract: This paper examines media coverage of the 2014-15 measles outbreak that began at Disneyland and spread throughout the United States and into Canada and Mexico. Specifically, it focuses on the construction of ‘anti-vaxxers’ as a central character in the outbreak’s unfolding narrative who came to represent a threat to public health and moral order. Although parents who hold strong anti-vaccine views are small in number, media representations of ‘anti-vaxxers’ as prominent figures fail to capture the broad range of views and behaviours that constitute what we today call ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and thus delimit our understanding of this increasingly complex health issue.

Everyday Discrimination in Canada: Prevalence and Patterns

Abstract: Using nationally representative data from the 2013 Canadian Community Health Survey, this article examines the prevalence and patterning of self-reported everyday discrimination in Canada. Almost twenty-three percent of Canadians report experiencing everyday discrimination. The most common types reported are gender, age, and race, followed by discrimination based on physical characteristics such as weight. Sex, age, marital status, race, place of birth, and body mass index all contribute to individuals’ reported experiences of discrimination. Gay men report particularly high levels of discrimination based on sexual orientation; Blacks, Asians, and Aboriginals report particularly high levels of racial discrimination; and Arabs, South and West Asians, and Aboriginals report particularly high levels of religious discrimination. There is strong evidence of the persistence of everyday discrimination in Canada, across multiple social groups, despite legal protections for marginalized groups. Suggestions are made for addressing the roots of discrimination at both the individual and the collective levels.

Strategic Incapacitation of Indigenous Dissent: Crowd Theories, Risk Management, and Settler Colonial Policing

Abstract: Engaging scholarship from sociologies of security to protest policing, this article explores how risk management and actuarial tools have been operationalized in Canadian policing of Indigenous protests. We detail RCMP actuarial tools used to assess individual and group risk by tracing how these techniques are representative of much older trends in the criminal justice system surrounding the management of risk, but also have been advanced by contemporary databanking and surveillance capacities. Contesting public claims of police impartiality and objectivity, we highlight how the construction of riskiness produces an antagonism towards “successful” Indigenous protests. Though the RCMP regularly claim to “protect and facilitate the right to lawful advocacy, protest and dissent,” we show how these practices of strategic incapacitation exhibit highly antagonistic forms of policing that are grounded in a rationality that seeks to demobilize and delegitimize Indigenous social movements.

Becoming Your Own Device: Self-Tracking Challenges In The Workplace

Abstract: Workplaces have long sought to improve employee productivity and performance by monitoring and tracking a variety of indicators. Increasingly, these efforts target the health and wellbeing of the employee – recognizing that a healthy and active worker is a productive one. Influenced by managerial trends in personalized and participatory medicine (Swan 2012), some workplaces have begun to pilot their own programs, utilizing fitness wearables and personal analytics to reduce sedentary lifestyles. These programs typically take the form of gamified self-tracking challenges combining cooperation, competition, and fundraising to incentivize participants to get moving. While seemingly providing new arrows in the bio-political quiver – that is, tools to keep employees disciplined yet active, healthy yet profitable (Lupton 2012) – there is also a certain degree of acceptance and participation. Although participants are shaped by self-tracking technologies, “they also, in turn, shape them by their own ideas and practices” (Ruckenstein 2014: 70). In this paper, we argue that instead of viewing self-tracking challenges solely through discourses of power or empowerment, the more pressing question concerns “how our relationship to our tracking activities takes shape within a constellation of habits, cultural norms, material conditions, ideological constraints” (Van Den Eede 2015: 157). We confront these tensions through an empiric case study of self-tracking challenges for staff and faculty at two Canadian universities. By cutting through the hype, this paper uncovers how self-trackers are becoming (and not just left to) their own devices.

“If the Work Requirement is Strong”: The Business Response to Basic Income Proposals in Canada and the US

Abstract: Historical accounts of the business response to basic income proposals imply that employer attitudes have been mixed. In the 1970s and 1980s, when an array of basic income schemes was proposed, some groups were supportive and others were opposed. This paper shows that, in a number of high-profile proposals in Canada and the US, behind the apparent dissensus among business groups lays a consensus stance against universalistic and unconditional guaranteed income schemes. The disagreement among business groups comes down to either (1) a basic misunderstanding of proposal details, or (2) the fact that the policy itself can take on a wide range of concrete forms. To the extent that business has exhibited support for guaranteed income policies, the actual policies in question tended to be “two-tiered” rather than unitary, selective rather than universal, and miserly rather than generous. The income maintenance policies that garnered some support among business groups would all include explicit or implicit work requirements for “able-bodied” adults. By contrast, generous, unconditional guaranteed income policies that reduce workers’ market dependence—namely, those that basic income advocates find desirable—found no audience in business circles. I close by exploring the mechanisms underlying the impact of basic income on bargaining relationships in the labour market and comment on the promises and pitfalls of a social policy that continues to be highly malleable.

"Who's Got My Back?": A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Suicidality and Perceptions of Social Support in British Columbia and Saskatchewan

Abstract: Critically reconsidering Durkheim’s sociology of suicide, we develop a quantitative analysis of individual level data contained in the Canadian Community Health Survey (2009-2012) to investigate the relationship between perceptions of social support and suicidality in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. We operationalize Durkheim’s general sociology to investigate relationships between people’s perceptions of the more objective aspects of social life (structural-institutional) and the more subjective dimensions of social life, on suicidal ideation. We find that people’s perceptions of the quality of social support available to them significantly affect susceptibility to suicidality, lending credence to key aspects of Durkheim’s general sociology of social pathology.

The Sociology of Near Misses: A Methodological Framework For Studying Events That ‘Almost Happened’

Abstract: Near miss research shifts the conceptual focus away from the negative outcome of events to the study of everyday close calls and represents an alternative pathway into knowledge production. The discipline of sociology is well suited for the study of near misses given its focus on social context, social meanings, and analyzing social interactions and patterns of group behaviour. This article discusses the challenges that researchers will face when conducting near miss research as well as different near miss data collection strategies. A comparison of two unique near miss data sets, on the same population, is also provided in order to illustrate that different methodologies capture different types of near miss information. Near misses represent an untapped area of research not yet fully explored by sociologists and social scientists.

The Two Durkheims: Founders and Classics in Canadian Introductory Sociology Textbooks

Abstract: For contemporary Durkheim scholars, the presentation of Durkheimian sociology in introductory textbooks is notoriously flawed. In this article, we examine the presentation of Durkheim’s work in popular English-language Canadian sociology textbooks. We show that textbooks present two distinct “Durkheims.” First, they characterize him as a founder of the discipline and the sociological project of challenging common-sense explanations of social life. Second, Durkheim appears as the father of structural functionalism who advocates a conservative, integrating vision of society. We argue that to understand why these two versions of Durkheim persist in sociology textbooks, we must appreciate the symbolic place of classical authors in the discipline. The two “textbook Durkheims” endure because they operate as symbols for both the coherence and divisions of the discipline. We suggest that integrating contemporary Durkheimian scholarship into textbooks would require revising conventional textbook approaches of sorting classical authors as founders of contending sociological perspectives.

Big Oil U: Canadian Media Coverage of Corporate Obstructionism and Institutional Corruption at the University of Calgary

Abstract: A 2015 investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) into the involvement of Enbridge Inc. at the University of Calgary drew widespread media attention in Canada on issues of academic integrity and legitimacy as well as renewed attention to the increasing centrality of corporate dollars in public institutions. All of this was further embedded in a public consideration of climate change and the contested legitimacy of carbon corporate interests. A qualitative content media analysis of 70 published stories from Canadian news sources reveals a stark contrast between corporate and non-corporate media frames. Our analysis shows the parallel efforts of the University of Calgary, Enbridge, and corporate media to frame out the central issues of corporate obstructionism in public institutions and, equally, institutional corruption around the mandate, purpose, and intention of those public institutions.