The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism sponsored 165 research studies, which were carried out in the years 1964–7. Of these, 24 were published by the Commission and distributed widely through the services of Information Canada. Publication proceeded in two series: “Research Studies of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism,” and “Research Documents of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.” The first series was comprised of studies which it was considered should be available in both official languages. The second series included studies judged to be of more specialized interest; these were published in the language of the author. Both series, listed in order of publication and by author and title, are set out in Table i.

Does the rise of new social movements (NSMs) represent a challenge for the traditional political parties in Quebec? Though this question can be answered from many perspectives, this study focuses on the programmatic aspect of this challenge that encompasses both a number of new societal issues and adherence to new values promoted by the NSMs. More precisely, it addresses the following questions: have the issues of environment and the respect of women's rights been already integrated into the political platforms of the two mainstream political parties in Quebec, the Liberal Party of Quebec and the Parti Québécois? Can the activists of those political parties be distinguished from the members of environmental and women's rights movements with regard to their values? On the one hand, both the Liberal party and the Parti Québécois have for a long time incorporated into their platforms issues linked to the defence of the environment and to the promotion of gender equality. On the other hand, the authors observe that the adherence to postmaterialist values is stronger in the NSMs than in the parties. One main conclusion is that one cannot compare adherence to the new values in the parties and the NSMs as two homogeneous blocs. Instead, the authors see four distinct organizations. They encourage further research to examine other dimensions of the problem such as the organizational aspect of the political challenge posed by the rise of NSMs.

How much effort by politicians and public administrators is needed to create awareness of proposed new policies or policy changes? Is broad newspaper coverage of proposed legislation and the high visibility of a minister enough to spread a significant amount of information? This note reports a study of the effectiveness of communication by one federal department, especially of a significant bill proposed by it.

The establishment of well-accepted and useful public policy depends on an adequate flow of information. A careful assessment of the wants and needs of society is required. The best policies are established when interested parties exchange opinions and ideas. If adequate communication about proposed plans does not occur, this exchange cannot take place. Perhaps policy-makers too readily assume that communication with other significant persons is occurring.

The primary purpose of this study was to explore the degree of knowledge evinced by a group which would be significantly affected by an apparently widely publicized piece of proposed federal legislation relating to business activity. The amount of knowledge demonstrated by the group is one indication of the effectiveness of the communication efforts of the minister and the department.

In autumn 1971 and early January 1972, the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs was perhaps more visible than at any other time in its history. The minister, Ronald Basford, had spent several years building and strengthening the department, as well as actively informing the public of a highly intensified orientation towards consumer protection and scrutiny of business activities.

Community action: diversity and ambiguity

The present article tries to outline the diversity and the internal tensions in community action by examining various forms of community consciousness (revolutionary, radical, defensive, reformist) and various kinds of leadership activity (protest, organizational, pragmatic). The existence of several kinds of leadership combined with multiple possibilities of action produces splintered activity which is reinforced by its dependence in the political arena and by political restraints. Community action in the process of political decision-making has little impact on the determination of the rules of the game, which are controlled by the government, and on the legitimate and public definition of the issues, which are set, in part, by the mass media. Concerted community action is thus held to be a precarious social movement whose particular conditions of origin, situation, and the peripheral position in society of its community agents determine its heterogeneous, critical, and Utopian dimensions.

This study assesses the contribution of five of the research studies done for the Macdonald Royal Commission and of the opening chapter of the Commission Report to our understanding of the state. It examines the use of the term state, the economic and social functions that the latter is seen to perform, and the light that these studies may shed on such thorny topics as authority, legitimacy and citizenship in the late twentieth century. It concludes that, despite individual contributions of note, there are real limitations to what this Commission and its research associates tell us about the state.

Concepts and Analytical Techniques of Administrative Phenomena

Among the phenomena inherent in administrative activities, four key categories may be distinguished: (1) the “duties” of the administration which give rise to whole families of activities and operations; (2) administrative “roles” which facilitate execution of these duties and provide the functional means for their execution; (3) administrative “organs” or institutions, charged with exercising the executive powers and which organize the agents assuming various administrative roles; and (4) the administrative “process” or information exchange circuits which inter-connect administrative duties, roles, and organs.

It is argued that the roles emerge from the type of operation, that the organs are, in several forms, postulated by the types of roles, and that the administrative processes are brought into being by the differing outcomes of the work of the administrative organs. We have here the embryo of a structural-functional theory of administration.

The thesis is presented throughout as a method of analysing the organization and operation of administrative institutions and as a means which may be used for reforming them. Such an analytical system could serve as a bridge facilitating comparative analysis of different administrative institutions and as the administrative element of a general theory of politics.

In the study of consumer spending a wide variety of factors, ranging from age, sex, and family size, through occupation, religion, and class background, to future expectations, advertising and personal influence, and compulsiveness, have been shown to have some influence on consumer taste and demand. Yet the precise influence these factors have, and the value which they should be assigned are still largely unknown. This paper offers a theoretical framework as one possible way of treating factors involved in consumer spending in a systematic manner. The approach is still in the process of formulation so that only the general structure of the theory can be presented.

Two assumptions are made about factors which influence consumer spending. First, it is assumed that factors may be treated as aspects of social systems or sub-systems. They may be viewed as contributing to one or other of the problems which all social systems must solve, to what have been called the adaptive, the goal attainment, the integrative, and the pattern-maintenance-tension-management problems. Thus factors are related to one another, in the first instance, by means of their functioning for the solution of system problems. Secondly, it is assumed that all factors do not have the same order of influence on consumer spending. Rather, factors are related to one another in a hierarchical way so that some can be treated as more general in their influence than others, and as unifying the more specific factors in some way. This view is derived from the more general assumption that social systems are composed of a number of distinct levels of structural organization.

The Logic of Political Survival, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2003, pp. xiii, 536

The Logic of Political Survival is much more than its title suggests. Its main focus is certainly on the survival of political leaders, but its embrace extends to economic development, nation-building, democratization, war and peace, protest, civil war, and revolution. All of these topics are subsumed under a single theory that is elaborated formally and validated through a truly gargantuan exercise in data analysis. It is, without doubt, an extraordinary attempt to answer some very big questions.