Axel Van den BergMcGill University | McGill · Department of Sociology
Axel Van den Berg
PhD
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74
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475
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
August 1984 - present
Publications
Publications (74)
One of the most widely agreed-upon tenets of the current “postpositivist” consensus in sociological theory is the categorical dismissal of the pursuit of value neutrality in the social and natural sciences, a pursuit that is seen as both futile and undesirable. This dismissal is based on the rejection of the “positivist” claim that mainstream scien...
Global convergence of public policies has been regarded as a defining feature of the late twentieth century. This study explores the generalizability of this thesis for three road safety measures: (i) road safety agencies; (ii) child restraint laws; and (iii) mandatory use of daytime running lights. This study analyzes cross-national longitudinal d...
Global convergence of public policies has been regarded as a defining feature of the late twentieth century. This study explores the generalizability of this thesis for three road safety measures: i) road safety agencies; ii) child restraint laws; and iii) mandatory use of daytime running lights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using su...
Combating Poverty critically analyses the growing divergence between Quebec and other large Canadian provinces in terms of social and labour market policies and their outcomes over the past several decades. While Canada is routinely classified as a single, homogeneous 'liberal market' regime, social and labour market policy falls within provincial...
This article addresses the claim, particularly popular in the 2000s and implicitly resting on a segmentation view of the labour market, that a flexible labour market-driven immigration policy (within the EU as well as from outside), often associated to a 'Canadian model', would respond to the economic needs of continental European countries. A comp...
The objective of the current study is to determine to what extent the reduction of Chile's traffic fatalities and injuries during 2000-2012 was related to the police traffic enforcement increment registered after the introduction of its 2005 traffic law reform.
A unique dataset with assembled information from public institutions and analyses based...
Objectives:
The objective of the current study is to determine the contribution of Chile's 2005 traffic law reform, police enforcement, and road investment infrastructure to the reduction of traffic fatalities and severe injuries from 2000 to 2012.
Methods:
Analyses based on structural equation models were carried out using a unique database mer...
In November 2011 the Mowat Centre published the much-heralded final report of its Employment Insurance Task Force. The report contained 18 major recommendations intended to deal with the range of issues and failures that beset the current EI system. The recommendations amount to nothing less than “a blueprint for a strengthened national program to...
The recent economic crisis has highlighted the issue of unequal distribution of vulnerability among categories of employees, which is exacerbated in times of perceived uncertainty. One major line of labour market segmentation in terms of security is between national citizens and immigrants. However, an intentional use of migrants as secondary segme...
The article takes a closer look at the effect of Quebec's policies to combat poverty among families with children. The article explores comparisons to see how does Quebec stack up against the other Canadian provinces and other countries when it comes to poverty rates among different types of families.
This article criticises the multiplicity of meanings that have been attached to the term ‘flexicurity’ and the largely rhetorical, depoliticising uses to which it has been put by EU-level policy makers and analysts. It then proceeds to examine the two cases in which the underlying idea of flexicurity – that social protection and economic performanc...
In response to Michael Burawoy's call for a "public sociology" and to the question of public sociology's place vis-à-vis Canadian sociology, this essay presents four major points. First, Burawoy's conception of public sociology is a hybrid of several different kinds of activities and stances which should be assessed separately on their respective m...
In this paper, we seek to understand the formation of cultural values and the hierarchies of aesthetic judgment among adults and children from Brazil and Canada. Are aesthetic judgments consistent within cultures? Across age groups? Across cultures? This paper looks at some initial work on these questions. In 1982 Gardner and Winner proposed that t...
In this article we extend our work on the limitations of the Gardner and Winner U-curved artistic development hypothesis [Gardner, Howard, Winner, Ellen, 1982. First intimations of artistry. In: Strauss, S. (Ed.), U-shaped Development. Academic Press, New York, pp. 147–168]. In our previous work we have cast serious doubt on the supposed universal...
There are three broad explanations for why workers adapt, or fail to adapt, to technological change in the workplace. The adversarial perspective holds that employment security produces resistant workers, and conversely that insecurity assures efficiency in adapting a workforce to technological and organizational changes. Institutionalists argue th...
In the debates about the relationship between labour flexibility and employment security, the actual strategies managers employ under different policy regimes tends to be overlooked. This paper examines the nature of deployment strategies that managers employ for their retained labour force in production plants in Canada and Sweden in three industr...
This article provides an empirical assessment of the social psychological underpinnings of arguments that link labor market security to wage flexibility. We employ data from two surveys of blue-collar manufacturing workers, one from Canada and the other from Sweden, that were conducted by the respective national statistics agencies. The dependent v...
The advancement of social theory requires an analytical approach that systematically seeks to explicate the social mechanisms that generate and explain observed associations between events. These essays, written by prominent social scientists, advance criticisms of current trends in social theory and suggest alternative approaches. The mechanism ap...
Sustained growth requires labour flexibility - wage changes, mobility between employers, or acceptance of changing technology within the workplace. But it is claimed that some limits on flexibility increase productivity. Limits to wage cuts and increases in the employment security of workers may encourage mobility and induce workers to more readily...
Many Western art educators lament the demise of drawing artistry and spontaneity in children once they reach the years of middle childhood. Few individuals make it through these artistic doldrums to re-emerge as adolescent artists. This process of decline in aesthetic production and eventual rebirth is referred to by Gardner (1990) as the "u-shaped...
There is a substantial body of writing that identifies efficiency advantages from the provision of employment security, both within individual plants and at the level of the national economy. However, the business cycle persists in capitalist economies, so the question arises: how do managements deal with the fluctuations in the demand for labour w...
The spectacular growth of Marxist literature on politics and the state in capitalist society has been widely hailed as cumulative proof of Marxism's success in producing an effective theory of the political superstructure. More generally, it has been seen as confirmation of the health and vigor of Marxist theory. Axel van den Berg raises serious qu...
Jürgen Habermas's long search for a firm normative founda¬tion for the critique of "distorted" consciousness has repeatedly come up against the basic dilemma plaguing the entire Frankfurt School tradition: seeking to expose the "falsity" of majority opinion without basing oneself on the implicitly authoritarian claim of possessing privileged access...
In recent years there has been a spectacular growth of Marxist literature on politics and the state in capitalist society. The aim of this thesis is to determine whether this literature has contributed towards a viable, genuinely Marxist theory of the state and to assess the state of current Marxist theorizing more generally. On the basis of a comp...
Projects
Projects (2)
The alleged rift between sociological theory and actual sociological research has been widely lamented in recent years. In particular, many observers feel that there is a serious disconnect between the so-called ‘postpositivist’ consensus to which most sociological theorists subscribe and the research practices of empirically-minded sociologists. But while much lamented, claims as to its extent and depth have so far been based on casual observation, anecdote and impressionistic evidence only. This project proposes to examine the character and extent of this alleged rift empirically by systematically documenting, mapping and analyzing the degree and manner in which 'postpositivism' has penetrated the sociological research literature—or has failed to do so. This appraoch can provide us with the in-depth understanding of the actual relationship between contemporary theory and research practice on which to base a thorough examination and re-thinking of the fundamental relationship between theory and research in the discipline of sociology and of the conditions under which it might be strengthened and made more mutually beneficial than many believe is currently the case.
The ‘postpositivist’ consensus that emerged from the 'epistemological turn' of the late 1960s converges on a number of key tenets. At a minimum they include a profound skepticism about the possibility of objectively valid sociological knowledge, a rejection of the possibility and desirability of 'value free' social science, rejection of the 'scientistic' equation of 'true' science with the methodologies of the natural sciences; rejection of social-structural determinism in favour of indeterminacy and the power of human agency; and insistence on the primacy of interpretation of meaning over causal explanation in the human sciences.
For the purpose of this project these postpositivist tenets have been grouped into five broad issue areas. For each of these we will develop a list of key terms associated with the relevant postpositivist vocabulary which will be used to draw a random sample from the Web of Knowledge database of sociological research articles that employ the terms in question. All the selected articles will be subjected to systematic qualitative content analysis to determine the degree to which the use of postpositivist vocabulary signals firm commitment, or not, to the underlying postpositivist tenets. This will enable us to gauge the actual extent, character and depth of the penetration of postpositivist thinking in actual sociological research. On the basis of the empirical patterns we will find we will then be able to develop an analysis of the current relationship between theory and research practice and the directions in which it is or might be evolving in the near future, as well as a more general diagnosis of the current state of health of the discipline. In addition, the empirical evidence of the nature of the rift, or its absence, will enable us to make a contribution to the ongoing debates about the epistemological foundations of the discipline in the sociological theory literature.
Moreover, our empirically-based understanding of the current role of 'theory' within the discipline of sociology will help us contribute to the renewal of a more fruitful relationship between theory and research practice.
