Call Yourself a Sociologist—And You've Never Even Been Arrested?!*

Cet article tente de retourner aux racines de la sociologie en tant que discipline et propose l'argument selon lequel ces racines sont emprein-tes de radicalisme. Après avoir comparé les chemins plutôt différents empruntés par la sociologie en Angleterre et au Canada, l'auteure poursuit en examinant le statut de la sociologie au Canada dans les années 1990. L'avènement du féminisme, en particulier les sociologues féministes, a été crucial et, d'une certaine façon, analogue à l'arrivée du marxisme auparavant. La conjuncture économique difficile et la montée de la droite représentent toutefois, dans les années 1990, une menace pour la sociologie. L'auteure en arrive à la conclusion que le postmodernisme constitue un recul, plutôt qu'un progrès, et que nous devons regarder ailleurs si nous voulons conserver et développer le potentiel de la sociologie «radicale». This article is an attempt to return to the roots of sociology as a discipline and make the argument that these roots are “radical.” After comparing the rather different trajectories of sociology in England and Canada, the author proceeds to examine the state of sociology in Canada in the 1990s. The intervention of feminism, and in particular feminist sociologists, has been crucial, and is in some ways analogous to the intervention of Marxism at an earlier period. Dire economic straits and the rise of the Right present sociology with new dangers in the 1990s, however. The author concludes that postmodernism constitutes a retreat, rather than an advance, and that we must look elsewhere if we are to retain and develop the potential of a “radical” sociology.     

Gender training for development practitioners: only a partial solution

This article considers gender training for Oxfam staff working on a development program or project in a particular context where their experience of gender relations and ability to seek gender equality is informed by their hierarchial position, by their national culture, and by the fact that institutions are also gendered. Thus, the article focuses on contextualizing gender training and on the potential of such training to transform institutions. The first section looks at gender training in the Oxfam head office and notes that, although Oxfam identifies itself as a learning organization, the former Training Department has been devolved into separate divisions, so there is no longer any centrally available gender training. The next section describes gender training in the field context where hierarchial positions that may influence the effectiveness of training are created by the age and sex of the trainer and where it is important to distinguish between gender frameworks (what is taught) from pedagogy (how it is taught). Oxfam's present gender training is limited by a lack of documentation of gender training efforts, by trainees' personal resistance to concepts of gender, by language barriers, and by logistical problems. The article then explores Oxfam's use of gender training as a transformative tool and notes that Oxfam focuses on individual rather than internal organizational transformation. It is concluded that gender training is only a partial solution unless its potential for personal and political transformational is recognized and fostered.     

Targeting intermediaries to recruit older women for qualitative, longitudinal research

Crafting a comprehensive recruitment plan for qualitative, longitudinal research requires consideration of many issues, particularly when a culturally diverse sample of older women is to be recruited for interviews conducted in their homes. The development of a detailed recruitment plan for a phenomenological investigation of older widows' experience of home care is described. The plan's two inter-related foci (targeted intermediaries and sequential phases) are presented. Strategies used to recruit participants through each targeted intermediary are explained, and the implementation of the sequential phases of the recruitment process is described. Successes and difficulties are considered in relation to the literature on recruiting older adults for research.     

Asymptotic Efficiency in Parametric Structural Models with Parameter‐Dependent Support

In certain auction, search, and related models, the boundary of the support of the observed data depends on some of the parameters of interest. For such nonregular models, standard asymptotic distribution theory does not apply. Previous work has focused on characterizing the nonstandard limiting distributions of particular estimators in these models. In contrast, we study the problem of constructing efficient point estimators. We show that the maximum likelihood estimator is generally inefficient, but that the Bayes estimator is efficient according to the local asymptotic minmax criterion for conventional loss functions. We provide intuition for this result using Le Cam's limits of experiments framework.