Few books have been so important in the growth of social self-understanding in Canada asThe Vertical Mosaic; few works of scholarship have had such a profound influence on academic and more general analyses of Canadian society. It is fitting and timely therefore that, a generation after its publication, we should revisit John Porter′s great work. I was pleased to help sponsor the colloquium onThe Vertical Mosaicthat gave rise to this volume, and I am honoured to contribute this foreword.

I leave it to the able scholars who have contributed the essays that follow to assess Porter′s work...

The purpose of this volume is to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication ofThe Vertical Mosaic(1965), arguably the most important book in the history of English-language Canadian sociology. In this commemoration, we hope likewise to honour the memory of the book′s author, John Porter, probably the best known and most influential sociologist this country has yet produced.

Like many sociologists of the 1950s and 1960s, John Porter did not have the kind of straightforward career path we would now consider typical. Porter never finished high school, worked for several years at odd jobs, served a five-year stint...

Thirty years have passed since publication ofThe Vertical Mosaic, the defining book in Canadian sociology and a benchmark for Canadian social science. John Porter was then forty-three years of age. He was only fifty-seven years old when he died prematurely in 1979. Porter′s entire teaching career spanned thirty years. He graduated from the London School of Economics in 1949 and returned to the Canada he had left at the age of fifteen. That year he began teaching at Carleton College, which had been established to train war veterans like himself.

John Porter began research forThe Vertical Mosaic(1965)...

Considerable change has taken place in the relations between ethnic groups in Canada and between them and the institutions of the society since the publication ofThe Vertical Mosaicthree decades ago. The transformations, as will be seen, are partly a matter of degree, but they also are in some ways changes in the nature of the relationships. In this essay the evolution of groups and of their societal relationships will be examined for these three major axes of ethnic differentiation in Canada: Native peoples in relation to the larger society; English and French relations; and immigrants, their descendants, and...

My first idea about how to address the problem of the missing women was to begin by fitting women intoThe Vertical Mosaic. But this did not work for two important reasons.

The first reason is that women were indeed missing from the elites Porter described. In fact, Porter (1965: 264) made it quite clear that ′there are no women′ in his economic elite and that Diefenbaker ′broke new ground bringing a woman into Cabinet′ (1965: 396). He wrote about ′Dr Clark′s Boys′ (1965: 425) and ′C.D. Howe′s Men′ (1965: 430) in the federal bureaucracy, without feeling the need to...

The empirical studies of elites inThe Vertical Mosaicrepresent John Porter′s most important intellectual legacy. This work was, and remains, a challenge to English-Canadian sociology, directing attention to the systematic study of power and wealth, situating capital at the centre of power, and laying a claim to the sociological study of the state. In joining analysis of education and occupational mobility to the study of elites in one volume, Porter set the broad, probabilistic associations between parental background, ethnicity, education, and jobs, which describe the patterns of social stratification in the population, against the deep inequalities of economic and...

In 1965, when John Porter′sThe Vertical Mosaicwas first published, it was a ′given′ of liberal thinking that a strong welfare state was a key to the development and maintenance of ′the good society.′ From the early 1940s and the issuing of the Marsh Report (1975[1943]), and especially during the 1960s, the Canadian welfare state had expanded rapidly. Indeed, it was perhaps in the 1960s more than any other period when a form of unalloyed reconstructive optimism gripped the builders of the Canadian welfare state. Certainly, there was not much sense that it would decline in influence or –...