Book Description

In this collection of essays the changing structure of the Canadian community, especially in its urban growth, is brought before the reader with many fresh insights, much vigorous comment, and apt illustration. The authors, concentrating on certain kinds of problems which have interested them individually, provide for student and general reader stimulating analysis of social phenomena which are under lively examination these days in Canada and beyond both in popular and semi-popular journals and magazines and in learned writings. Nathan Keyfitz opens the volume with a valuable background analysis of the way in which the population of Canada has reached its present numbers and distribution and examines the effects of immigration and of changing rates of birth and death. S.D. Clark deals with the controversial question of what the real characteristics of the suburban community can be seen to be and comments forcefully on the "suburbia" of Riesman, Whyte, et al. W.E. Mann presents a fascinating analysis of the patterns of life in a slum area of Toronto which swarms with factory workers and truck-drivers, with people of many racial origins, and which has developed social habits based largely on rooming-houses, small shops, and pubs. Jean Burnet provides an historical account of changing moral standards of sobriety and piety as reflected in sabbatarian and temperance movements in Toronto, long regarded as the quintessence of severity. Oswald Hall gives a valuable analysis of the patterns of growth in the professions and of the kinds of competitive struggles going on within them and at the borders between them as new groups strive to win this status in society. P.J. Giffen takes up an important related question of how interests of a self-governing profession relate to the expectations of the public and uses the legal profession as his example. Finally, Leo Zakuta adds to the scanty literature on Canadian political parties an analysis of the changing character of the C.C.F., long the dominant force in left-of-centre politics. The authors all are, or have been members of the staff in sociology at the University of Toronto, and their essays convey an excellent picture of the liveliness of the work they jointly carry forward. This volume will thus serve not only to introduce students to some of the kinds of problems sociologists are thinking about but will also make better known to them as a group some of the sociologists in Canada who are engaged with them.