Restructuring Societies: Insights from the Social Sciences

Jeffrey J. Cormier, Ph.D., specializes in Canadian society at McGill
University.

This intriguing collection of essays is based on a lecture series held
at the University of Guelph in 1996–97 in honor of William Winegard,
the former president of the university. Guests of the series were asked
to address the role that the social sciences and public policy play in
societies experiencing rapid restructuring. The result is quite an
eclectic mixture of viewpoints on the effects of government
restructuring, globalization, and neoliberal economic policy on local
communities.

The overall tone of the book is decidedly multidisciplinary. The
editors themselves are geographers, as is contributor Warren Moran.
Other contributors include former Ontarian Premier Bob Rae, Guelph
sociologists Belinda Leach and Anthony Winson, organizational
psychologist Julian Barling, historian Olive Dickason, and Professor
Emerita Jackie Wolfe-Keddie. Rae’s chapter is a theoretical one
comparing the views of Edmund Burke and George Orwell on social
revolutions. Rae uses these views to warn against the “common-sense
revolution” of Mike Harris’s Conservatives.

Moran uses the results of recent restructuring within New Zealand’s
government as a cautionary note for what could happen here in Canada.
Both Dickason and Wolfe-Keddie are interested in the restructuring of
the relations between Canada’s First Nations and the government and
examine those relations in some historical detail. Perhaps the strongest
chapters are those of Barling and Leach and Winson, who look at the
effects of globalization on Canada’s workforce. Leach and Winson, in
particular, present in-depth research showing how plant closings have
affected the everyday lives of several families living in rural
communities in Southern Ontario.

What this book lacks in continuity it makes up for in ingenuity. It is
refreshing to have so many different perspectives on such a pressing
issue.