The agricultural sector of Israel's Jewish population is not very large; nevertheless the role of agriculture in the political life of the country is of the utmost importance. Seven of the sixteen members of the present cabinet (July, 1956) are members of kibbutzim (collective agricultural settlements). Twenty-six of the seventy-five Jewish members who support the government coalition in the 120-member Knesset (Israel Parliament) are members of kibbutzim or of moshvei-ovdim (co-operative agricultural settlements). David Ben-Gurion, Israel's outstanding leader, who is the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, retains his affiliation with a kibbutz and declares himself to be an agricultural labourer. Recently, for example, he relinquished all his official positions and left for a year and a half to do agricultural work in a kibbutz in Israel's pioneering frontier area, the Negev. The Minister of Finance, the Director General of the Ministry of Defence, and the Secretary General of the Histadrut (Federation of Labour)–three of Israel's key positions–consider themselves members of kibbutzim and take pride in their past as agricultural labourers. The Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, a most popular figure with the youth of the country, was born and raised in a co-operative agricultural settlement, and his father, himself a farmer, is a member of the Knesset.

This study deals with what P. Sorokin calls “inter-generation occupational mobility.” It endeavours to ascertain the extent to which occupation is transmitted from father to son, and the occupational transfers that occur when sons do not follow their fathers' occupations. Similarity of occupation between father and son is called occupational stability; change of occupation from father to son is referred to as occupational mobility. Our study is concerned with both occupational stability and occupational mobility.

We started with the conviction that research of this kind can contribute to the knowledge of social stratification and social mobility in the province of Quebec. In fact, it is not easy to study social stratification as such. In almost any contemporary society what we call social stratification is a generalized concept which may refer to one or the other of several scales of stratification depending on the point of view adopted. Sorokin, for example, distinguishes three scales of social stratification. “Concrete forms of social stratification are numerous. The majority of them may, however, be reduced to three principal classes: the economic, the political, and the occupational stratification. As a general rule, these forms are closely intercorrelated with each other.”

According to the classical theory of interest, which long served as a framework for the theory of money, prices, and income, the rate of interest is determined by the supply of and demand for savings. Monetary theorists, such as Wicksell, Fisher, Hawtrey, and Keynes, erected an imposing edifice on this foundation. Then came the Great Depression and disillusionment, the Second World War and the pegged market régime. At the same time, a growing ferment in the literature undermined the classical foundations. With regard to the savings function, agnosticism prevailed. As for investment demand, empirical studies and theoretical developments alike relegated the rate of interest to a minor role in entrepreneurial decision-making. In deference to considerations of debt management, open market operations were held in abeyance. Thus, little was to be expected of quantitative credit control as an instrument of public policy in the post-war period.

More than two-thirds of Canadian trade union members, some 900,000 workers, belong to international unions. Unlike unionists in such countries as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia, whose heritage lies in national organizations, the majority of Canadian workers have for over three-quarters of a century aligned themselves in unions with American workers. The organizations which make up the structurally unique Canadian labour movement are most often relatively small sections of unions operating in the United States and Canada. On both sides of the border the same unions dominate the labour scene–their membership is in the major industries; and their support is essential to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and to the Canadian Labour Congress, which are the national labour centres.

Elite groups, from the point of view of sociological theory, are composed of individuals who are the effective decision-makers and co-ordinators of the social system. These individuals occupy, as Professor Mills has put it, “the command posts” of the institutional hierarchies of modern complex society. Empirical studies of élite groups are concerned with at least three problems. The first is an attempt to discover the principles on which a social system allocates certain types of individuals to the élites, or positions of power, and thereby denies power to others. In all social systems the allocation of these roles is orderly, and supported by a widely held ideology. There need be no correspondence between the ideology held and the realities of power. In most social systems certain biological and social characteristics stand out as putting an individual in a preferred group for recruitment to positions of power. Power is not exercised by youth and rarely by women. Religion, ethnic affiliation, educational experience, social class and other social characteristics may form the basis of preference. Thus a study of preferred social types is an initial step in the analysis of the structure of power.

Despite the fact that ethnicity is an important principle of social organization in Canada, there are very few studies that attempt to describe and analyse how it operates at different levels and in different parts of the social system. In this paper we suggest ways that might lead to a clearer understanding of the significance of ethnicity in the country and its communities. In its relevance to research, this paper is both methodological and programmatic. We hope that it will provide fruitful suggestions for research and for the clearer formulation of problems for study.

Students in the field of ethnic studies seldom consider more than one ethnic group or category at a time. Where the group selected for study forms an autonomous community, we get an exhaustive account of the group and its relations with the “outside world,” rather like the account of an individual's life history. Even where the people who are being studied make up a large element in our population and are dispersed both geographically and socially, there is a tendency to follow the same procedure and to deal with what is really a category as though it were an autonomous, discrete group; the picture we get is of individuals of such and such an ethnic group (as though their only identity were an ethnic one) and their relations with outsiders. This procedure is comparable to making an analysis of a small group by taking each individual in turn and describing him exhaustively without taking into account the structure of the group itself.

In this paper I intend to do little more than sketch in very broad outline some of the main features of the electoral anatomy of the province of Ontario as revealed by the official provincial election returns. Since I have relied solely on the actual voting record, which is, of course, tabulated by constituencies, my method is ecological and, unlike survey methods, provides only rough and indirect measures of the social and economic factors related to voting behaviour. My findings are entirely descriptive and do not go much beyond what is accessible to any alert newspaper reader who may have followed Ontario politics over the past two decades.

The chief methodological problem confronting ecological analysts of voting behaviour is how to equate electoral units with the administrative units by which population characteristics are tabulated in the census. In Ontario the smallest units for which official election statistics are given are polling subdivisions, but these fail to correspond to any units for which data on population characteristics are available. However, data on voting by townships can be derived from the election returns, and the census tabulates population characteristics by townships. I have made some determination of the voting habits of ethnic groups from data on townships, but have not set out these findings in detail in the present paper, which does not analyse units smaller than constituencies, and is thus confined to a very broad scrutiny of differential voting patterns.

It has been my good fortune to be a member of the Canadian public service for approximately twenty years. I hope that the authorities of the Bank of Canada will forgive me if I include in this period my employment with that important institution. I am afraid that the bank cannot escape the responsibility for having brought me here in the first place. It was characteristic of Ottawa and of the significant role of the bank that I felt myself to be a part of the larger public service from the start. Here I should confess that I made an attempt to enter the civil service from the beginning, but jobs were few and I did not make the grade. Upon graduation I made an application to write an examination but the opportunity to do so never arose. Unquestionably I was eliminated by inspection and, I have no doubt, quite rightiy so. It is proper that I should admit my failures from the outset. However, the bank was willing to take a chance. This was the first of many pieces of good luck which I have enjoyed.

The return of the Conservatives to power in 1911 was the signal for a mad scramble for place and position by the men who had weathered fifteen lean and hungry years of political adversity. In forming his cabinet, Borden was subjected to all the usual pressures exerted on such occasions and, in addition, he had to take cognizance of certain special factors arising from the election campaign just concluded. But in the cabinet-making process much more is involved than an awareness of constitutional conventions and an appreciation of the political realities of the moment. The selection of the personnel of his government is a most difficult task for a prime minister and one which involves a host of considerations, administrative, political, and personal. In the discharge of this important duty, much may be revealed of the qualities of leadership of the party chieftain. This was certainly true of Robert Borden, and a study of his first essay at cabinet-making is instructive and rewarding.