HISTORICAL & COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY

The Department of Sociology at McMaster is relatively unique by including researchers who do comparative and historical sociology as well as those who do qualitative and quantitative and applied statistical studies.   Students are exposed to comparative sociology in many substantive courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Department analyzes the comparative aspects of families, political systems, health care policies, gender relations, religion, deviance, the internet, race and immigration, work, culture, and the media. Undergraduate and graduate students learn historical methodology, the logic of historical explanation, and the techniques of archival research.  Some sociologists have developed and published on specific socio-historical projects. 

Peter Archibald:   Using oral history techniques, Peter Archibald has been researching the impact of, and workers' responses to, economic crises during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Workers have been said to respond to depriving economic crises by either rebelling collectively (an Optimistic Scenario) or individually, by becoming preoccupied with surviving, competing with other workers, and making various psychic adjustments to deprivation (a Pessimistic Scenario). Archibald interviewed 200 retired Hamilton workers about their personal, economic, and political experiences during the Great Depression. He found that a plurality of workers neither overtly rebelled nor completely conformed covertly. Both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios sometimes applied to the same individual workers, though the pessimistic scenario seemed to be the stronger of the two explanations. See his “Small expectations and great adjustments: how Hamilton workers most often experienced the great depression’.    Canadian Journal of Sociology, 1996.

Art Budros has developed a new specialization in the socio-historical aspects of slavery. He is working on three projects involving U.S. slavery: the causes of slave manumissions (freeing from slavery); the liberalization and restriction of manumission laws in the Old South; and the abolition of slavery in the North. Budros examines facilitators and inhibitors of the freeing of slaves. He finds that racist ideology helped to make white masters reluctant to free their slaves, while rising slave and tobacco prices, business prosperity, and expanded cotton production increased the rate at which slaves were freed. See his “Social Shocks and Slave Social Mobility: Manumission in Brunswick County, Virginia, 1782-1862.” American Journal of Sociology, 2004.

Ivy Bourgeault has been doing comparative research into the international migration of health care professionals, with a concentration on Australia, the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada.  She is also starting a comparative France/Canada study into the organizational and cultural context of professional health teams working in hospitals.

Carl Cuneo has published several papers on the origins of the Canadian Unemployment Insurance scheme on the basis of an intensive study of archival data on the workers’ movements during the Depression of the 1930s, the activities of appointment and elected government officials, and lobbying by employer groups. See, for example, his ‘State, Class and Reserve Labour: The Case of the 1941 Canadian Unemployment Insurance Act.’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. 16(2), 1979, 147-170. 

Cyril Levitt has studied the logic of historical and comparative reasoning and argumentation, such as in Weber’s Prostestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism.  In collaboration with William Shaffir, he published a socio-historical examination of a baseball riot on August 16, 1933, in The Riot at Christie Pits.  Toronto:  Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987. They examine the role of a baseball game which served as the triggering incident resulting in inter-ethnic violence among two ‘gangs’ at Christie Pits.  The most important factor leading to the outbreak of the open hostilities was anti-Semitism. Jewish youths growing up in Toronto during the thirties met social and occupational resistance from a smug Anglo-Saxon elite and a xenophobic Orange middle and working class. The Christie Pits riot was a struggle for turf between a primarily defensive déclassé group of Anglo youths and an upwardly mobile group of Jewish adolescents who had suffered discrimination.

Victor Satzewich specializes in historical sociology, race and ethnic relations, racism, immigration, political sociology, aboriginal peoples, Indian administration in Canada, and the Ukrainian diaspora. In his book, The Ukranian Diaspora (Routledge, 2002), Vic Satzewich traces one hundred and twenty five years of Ukranian migration, from the economic migration at the end of the nineteenth century to the political migration during the inter-war period and throughout the 1960s and 1980s resulting from the troubled relationship between Russia and the Ukraine. He looks at the ways the Ukranian Diaspora has retained its identity, at the different factions within it, and its response to the war crimes trials of the 1980s. Vic has also taken a socio-historical approach to much of his other research, such as Indian Agents and residential schools, migration, cattle killing in Alberta, and ethnic and racial relations in Canada. His new work is a socio-historical analysis of the International Union of the Save the Children Fund and the Russian Famine of 1921.

Bob Storey takes a socio-historical approach in much of his research, such as on the struggle to organize labour in the steel industry of the 1940s, and his more recent research on tracing the emergence of the workers’ movement for occupational health and safety in Ontario. He examines the relations and tensions between the workers movement for occupational health and safety and the environment movement in Ontario since the 1970s in ‘From the Environment to the Workplace… and Back Again? Occupational Health and Safety Activism in Ontario, 1970s – 2000+’ in Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. 2004.