Canadian Review of Sociology-Revue Canadienne De Sociologie最新文献

According to the budget-maximizing bureaucrat model, public sector employees should rationally seek to increase government budgets to increase their own power. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class and sectoral voting has largely been neglected in Canada. The ideological and voting preferences of the public sector has been unexamined since the 1980s. Using the Canadian Election Study (1968–2019), we revisit and expand on this literature. We find that the public sector holds more economically leftist attitudes than the public and that a sectoral cleavage has emerged, with public sector employees increasingly supporting the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP). We also find that social class moderates these two relationships, as professionals and managers in the public sector are significantly more likely to vote for the NDP and hold more leftist economic attitudes than their counterparts in both the private sector, and the routine non-manual and working class in the public sector.

This article examines the relationship between university prestige, disciplinary cultures, and the (re)production of funding inequalities in the humanities and social sciences. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods by analyzing: (1) data on 56,680 successful and unsuccessful grant applications submitted to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; (2) 43 interviews with past members of review committees, including in economics, history, sociology, and political science. Our findings show that university affiliations significantly influence funding allocation: even after controlling for other factors, scholars at more prestigious and larger institutions are more likely to secure grants for greater amounts. For the Insight grants, applicants affiliated with U3 universities receive, on average, nearly 20,000$ more than their colleagues from institutions outside the U15. This effect is strongest in disciplines where scientific quality is clearly defined and tightly linked to institutional status. In contrast, in disciplines where the definition of merit is more ambiguous and debated, evaluators rely less on university affiliation, and prestige plays a diminished role. These divergences highlight the need to distinguish between the formal, general norms adopted by funding agencies and the unwritten, situated norms that review committees rely on to evaluate and rank applications within their respective fields.

The mass expansion of higher education (HE) systems during the 20th century pushed social scientists to theorize how high participation systems continued to reproduce inequalities across socio-economic lines. One popular theory in sociology, dubbed effectively maintained inequality (EMI), suggests that families from the upper economic strata would maintain their competitive advantage by not only acquiring increasing amounts of education, but also gravitating toward the most prestigious tracks within HE. Despite the “flatter” status structure of Canada's HE system vis-à-vis international counterparts, this is a theory that has received empirical support from several domestic studies. Through this study, we re-examine the EMI hypothesis using the 2005 Ontario University Applicant Survey (OUAS), a little-known and thus far unexamined dataset that offers notable advantages relative to those historically analyzed in the Canadian EMI literature, including representative coverage of applicants to Ontario universities, holistic coverage of academic and demographic controls, and the ability to analyze both within- and between-sector forms of status-seeking. Our statistical analyses suggest that applicants from privileged socio-economic backgrounds behave in ways consistent with EMI, gravitating towards more prestigious HE options. We conclude by sketching a path forward for social stratification research in Canadian HE.

Extensive research has demonstrated the negative impact of food insecurity on mental health; however, the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying this relationship remain underexplored. Using data from the 2022 National Health Interview Survey (N = 25,703), this study investigates whether sleep problems mediate the relationship between food insecurity and mental health outcomes—specifically depressive and anxiety symptoms—and whether marital status moderates this relationship. The findings indicate that sleep problems partially mediate the effects of food insecurity on depressive and anxiety symptoms. In addition, the impact of sleep problems on these mental health outcomes is less severe among married individuals compared to their unmarried counterparts. However, marital status does not moderate the relationship between food insecurity and sleep problems, nor the relationship between food insecurity and mental health outcomes. The analysis of conditional indirect effects reveals a more pronounced mediation effect of sleep problems among unmarried individuals. These results suggest a partial protective role of marriage in mental health and underscore the importance of addressing sleep problems, particularly among unmarried individuals, in understanding the interplay between food insecurity, sleep problems, and mental health.

Graduate student mothers are in a unique position, balancing the competing roles of mother, student, and worker. The struggle to balance these roles often results in family-to-work conflict, an integral piece in maintaining gender inequality within universities and other similarly structured organizations. For a moment in time, the COVID-19 pandemic upended these organizations, changing the ways mothers performed their dueling roles through the removal of key resources and changes in flexibility. Using semi-structured interviews with 19 participants conducted throughout the fall and winter of 2022, this study explores how the lives of graduate student mothers were affected by the COVID-19 outbreak and shift to remote learning. For some, the pandemic negatively affected their progress due to a loss of resources and increased unpredictability. However, for others, the pandemic alleviated conflict between their dueling roles, allowing them to better manage their responsibilities regardless of interruptions in child care. The findings of this study contribute to a larger understanding of how organizational structure maintains inequality and how policies like remote work and child care may influence it.

Although increasing subsidized housing has been proposed as a solution to Canada's housing affordability crisis, few studies have investigated how access to subsidized housing affects the housing circumstances of Canadians. Using microdata from the 2021 Canadian Census, we compare children's odds of having unaffordable, overcrowded, and inadequate housing by residence in subsidized housing and family structure. For children in two-parent families, living in subsidized housing is associated with lower odds of having unaffordable housing but higher odds of having inadequate and overcrowded housing. For all others, living in subsidized housing is associated with lower odds of having unaffordable, inadequate, and overcrowded housing. Our findings underscore the importance of increasing subsidized housing, building units that can better meet the housing needs of those with housing vulnerability, and targeting those with the most unmet needs in alleviating Canada's housing affordability crisis.

Social capital is known to influence livelihoods, but how this operates in conflict situations is relatively under-researched. Leaning on the social capital theory, we investigate the association between conflict and the dynamics of bonding, bridging and linking social capital in the neglected “Anglophone” conflict between a separatist movement and the government of Cameroon, which impacts livelihoods and social relations. Using data generated through mixed methods, the study explores Granovetter's concept on the strength of weak ties in a conflict context. Results reveal an overall negative causal link between conflict and social capital accumulation with significant changes in membership in social networks. Bonding social capital was comparatively less affected, while bridging and linking social capital were observed to have deteriorated. The argument is that degraded bridging and linking social capital are destructive of social relations and livelihoods, and linking social capital does not constitute strength in weak ties.