Michael Atkinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 115002 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Atkinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Atkinson |
| SIGNATURE | ATKINSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | McMaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4378-0823 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 94 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 887 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 92 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Winning-at-all-costs: High-performance athletes learn to conform to the sport ethic
The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century , Alasdair Roberts
The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson, and the Making of Modern Canada . John Ibbotson
A Therapeutic Landscape for Some but Not for All: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Bethlem Royal Hospital Parkrun
This study sought to explore the experiences of those involved in the Bethlem parkrun. A mobile ethnography employing participant observation and informal discussion was conducted on the grounds of the hospital in London, United Kingdom. The findings focused on “what it is like” to participate in this parkrun and were organized into two themes: (a) Bethlem as a Shared Leisure Space and (b) Shared Leisure Space, But for Whom? Findings illustrated …
Mapping MAiD Discordance: A Qualitative Analysis of the Factors Complicating MAiD Bereavement in Canada
Medical assistance in dying (MAiD) is an evolving practice in Canada, with requests and outcomes increasing each year, and yet controversy is present-with a vast spectrum of ethical positions on its permissibility. International research indicates that family members who experience disagreement over their loved one's decision to have MAiD are less likely to be actively involved in supporting patients through the practical aspects of the dying pro…
Competitive dancers’ social identities and experiences of harm
The purpose of the research was to explore competitive dancers’ experiences of harm in the dance environment with a focus placed on dancers’ social identities. Limited attention has been given to instances of harm in competitive dance. In addition, the impact of social identities on experiences of harm has yet to be discussed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 competitive dancers. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis leading…
Democratic Accountability in Times of Crisis: Executive Power, Fiscal Policy and Covid-19
We examine the performance of four parliamentary democracies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as they confront the need for a substantial fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research covers the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2020. We score the four countries on nine components of democratic accountability using Mark Philp's distinction between formal and political accountability. We conclude, first, that to appreci…
Illuminating the liminality of the doctoral journey: Precarity, agency and Covid-19
Illuminating the liminality of the doctoral journey: precarity, agency and COVID-19
Considerations for making informed choices about engaging in open qualitative research
There is currently little guidance that exists for researchers in the sport and exercise sciences on open qualitative research practices. The purpose of paper is to provide researchers with guidance regarding the considerations necessary for making informed decisions about engaging in open research practices within qualitative inquiry. The guidance was developed through a series of four working group meetings with experts in qualitative research …
Want to Improve Math Scores? An Empirical Assessment of Recent Policy Interventions in Canada
The Canadian provinces have implemented various strategies aimed at improving kindergarten through 12th-grade mathematics performance. There is no clear evidence which, if any, of these strategies improve achievement scores. We apply hierarchical linear modelling to the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment data to isolate the effects of policy interventions. We find that efforts to improve learning conditions can be worthwhile, but t…
Elias’s Contribution to the Sociology of the Body: The Rediscovery of the Hinge
Exercise is medicine: Critical considerations in the qualitative research landscape
Since the American Medical Association and the American College of Sports Medicine partnered to launch Exercise is Medicine® (EIM) in 2007, the program has gained traction in 43 countries. The EIM discourse has been fruitful for framing exercise/physical activity as a form of disease prevention and/or symptom management for chronic conditions and mental health. This editorial ‘sets the stage’ for the articles within the special issue that coalesc…
Refugee mentoring: Sharing the journey
Beyond Boundaries: The Development and Potential of Ethnography in the Study of Sport and Physical Culture
Ethnographic approaches to the study of sport and physical culture have developed primarily within physical education and kinesiology programs and are typically framed in dialogue with sociological theorizing of agency, structure, power, and inequality. Beginning with reference to anthropology and sociology, we review the emergence, development, and subsequent transdisciplinary travels of ethnographic study of sport and physical culture. In doing…
Avada kedavra: Disenchantment, empathy, and leaving ethnography
Exiting long-term ethnographic research is occasionally fraught with a litany of professional, ethical, and existential dilemmas. As ethnographers in physical cultural studies (PCS) attest, participation with people in the field over the long term writes a researcher rather deeply. Being personally contoured by a physical culture under study can enchant a researcher as new physical experiences occur, meaningful social bonds are forged, affective …
Are Canadians Stealth Democrats? An American Idea Comes North
In an influential 2002 study, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse make the provocative argument that high numbers of Americans seek “stealth democracy,” that is, processes that discover the will of the people without requiring substantial citizen effort. This article applies the concept in a Canadian province and argues that the stealth democracy measure represents an ambiguous amalgam of attitudes that are only loosely related to one another…
Ethnography
I have spent the better part of the past twenty years entrenched in one ethnographic research setting or another. My lengthy field experiences do not automatically qualify me as an expert on ethnography, as much as they connote my deep commitment to ethnographic epistemologies. From the very moment I learned about ethnography in an undergraduate lecture hall, I could hardly believe a university would actually pay someone to hang around with peopl…
Fiscal rules in the Canadian provinces: Abject failure or qualified success
Most Canadian provinces have introduced legislation to require politicians of all ideological stripes to meet annual balanced budget (BB) targets. Critics of this type of legislation argue that it is unnecessary, confining, and subject to manipulation. We examine provincial balanced budget legislation before and after the Great Recession and argue that the response of provinces needs to be evaluated taking into account the multiple objectives of …
Better Politicians: If We Pay, Will They Come
While each election provides the Canadian House of Commons with a fresh batch of politicians, no consideration has been given to the question of whether the quality of politicians is improving. Yet improving quality has been the focus of several commissions urging increases in MP compensation. This article addresses the competence and compensation questions by asking whether changes in levels of compensation might make a difference to the educati…
Richard Simeon and the Policy Sciences Project
In his classic 1976 article on the state of policy studies in Canada, Richard Simeon explicitly warned against following the path toward a policy science. Simeon was suspicious of the normative agenda embedded in the policy sciences project and worried that it would submerge politics in a broader set of interdisciplinary concerns. Was Simeon right? The policy sciences have not developed the way their principal proponent, Harold Lasswell, had anti…
Researching Sport
‘Sport sociology’ implies a different form, content, and perceptual tack on the nature of academic research. Projects embedded in a sport sociology framework are generally flavoured with keen sociological insight and argument, but thematic emphasis in them may lean more heavily toward substantive articulations of sport’s cultural significance in society rather than as theoretical/conceptual excursions into sport. Research in the sociology of spor…
Interpretive Approaches in the Sociology of Sport
This chapter explains interpretive sociology within the larger field of sociology, and focuses on the two main expressions of interpretive sociology in the sociology of sport: hermeneutic analyses and ethnographic analyses. The critical turn in North American and British sociology saw an increasing emphasis on power and the constraining features of social structure, even in the interpretive approaches to sociology. The contemporary (pre)dominance…
Who are you, and what are you doing here’: Methodological considerations in ethnographic Health and Physical Education research
In the pursuit of understanding declining levels of participation from scholastic Health and Physical Education (HPE), ethnographic research has been increasingly utilised as a tool to explore the intersubjective and intrasubjective meaning-making processes that concurrently invite or dissuade participation. Despite the ostensible epistemological benefits of deploying ethnographic research as a vehicle for better understanding contextual HPE (dis…
Public Policies toward Aboriginal Peoples: Attitudinal Obstacles and Uphill Battles
This paper examines public attitudes towards aboriginal policy in Canada, focusing on evidence from two surveys conducted in Saskatchewan, a province with a large and growing Aboriginal population. We show that although non-Aboriginals are collectively divided on Aboriginal public policies, expressing considerable support for some, but strong reservations when it comes to others; the individual-level evidence indicates that there is a single Abor…
Gender performativity during interviews with adolescent boys
The increased use, if not dominance, of interviewing techniques in qualitative research on sport and physical culture demands more focused and critical analyses of the situational factors that may influence the generation of interview data. One of the factors, of course, is the interviewer’s gender as it relates to the gender(s) of the research participants. Previous research investigating the social dynamics of interviewing suggests that gender …
Strong States and Weak States: Sectoral Policy Networks in Advanced Capitalist Economies
The theme of strong and weak states has recently figured largely in comparative political economy. However, significant variation across sectors in single countries in the degree to which the state is able and willing to intervene in the economy has led to calls for a disaggregated view of the state, with more attention devoted to the different levels – micro, meso, macro – at which the state confronts the economy. The concepts of strength and we…
Policy Networks, Policy Communities and the Problems of Governance
This article reviews and evaluates the literature on policy networks and policy communities that has emerged in the comparative public policy field. It argues that these concepts are important innovations because they suggest a renewed attempt to be both encompassing and discriminating in describing the policy process: encompassing because they refer to actors and relationships in the policy process that take us beyond political‐bureaucratic rela…
Paradigm Shifts and Policy Networks: Cumulative Change in Agriculture
This article presents an alternative trajectory to policy paradigm change to that outlined by Peter A. Hall's social learning model, in which unsuccessful efforts by state officials to respond to policy failures and anomalies in the existing paradigm eventually trigger a broader, societal, political partisan debate about policy principles. From this society-wide contestation over policy goals, problems, and solutions, a new policy paradigm emerge…
Triathlon, suffering and exciting significance
In this article, I examine how triathletes learn to physically manage, socially perform and individually reflect upon the endurance sport of triathlon as a microcosm of the 'civilising process'. Elias's particular conceptualisation of habitus is centrally utilised to explain why, at this particular point in civilising processes, more men and women in factions of the Canadian middle class quest for 'exciting significance' through gruelling enduran…
Parkour, Anarcho-Environmentalism, and Poiesis
As innovated by French 'free runners' David Belle and Sébastien Foucan in the1990s, Parkour is a physical cultural lifestyle of athletic performance focusing on uninterrupted and spectacular gymnastics over, under, around, and through obstacles in urban settings. Through the public practice of Parkour across late modern cities, advocates collectively urge urban pedestrians to reconsider the role of athleticism in fostering self-other environment …
Pretty in Ink: Conformity, Resistance, and Negotiation in Women's Tattooing
The Civilizing of Resistance: Straightedge Tattooing
The social lifestyle "Straightedge" is a response to the hedonistic bodily indulgences (e.g., substance abuse, promiscuity) of many North Americans. Practitioners emphasize self-restraint and bodily purity as a "deviant" alternative to these practices. Like other socially labelled outsiders, Straightedgers include tattooing in their lexicon of body modification activities. Resultantly, Straightedge tattoos have become signifiers of the group's un…
Moving Right Along: The Roots of Amateurism in the Canadian House of Commons
It has been argued that rapid membership turnover in the Canadian House of Commons robs the institution of a dedicated and experienced group of MPs and produces a Parliament stocked with political amateurs. Both electoral defeat and voluntary retirement have been seen to play a role in the amateurism phenomenon. The authors explore the roots of amateurism and critically examine the argument that a frustrating career structure in the House of Comm…
Rave and Straightedge, the Virtual and the Real: Exploring Online and Offline Experiences in Canadian Youth Subcultures
Over the past 10 years, sociologists have attended to the impacts of the Internet on youth subcultural coalescence, display, identity, and resistance. In this article, the authors develop a critique of this body of work, describing how existing research places undue emphasis on young people's experiences either online or offline and how a lack of consideration has been given to the ways that subcultural expressions are continuous across the appar…
Do We Need a Code of Conduct for Politicians? The Search for an Elite Political Culture of Corruption in Canada
Do we need a code of conduct for politicians, or are the existing unwritten rules a sufficient safeguard against acts of political malfeasance? Based on interviews with 84 backbench MPs, this article examines politicians' informal codes of conduct. The study reveals considerable disagreement in assessments of particular acts, notably those involving conflicts of interest and constituency service. Differences among MPs are related to a number of f…
Boys’ Bodies: Speaking the Unspoken
This book chapter is Closed Access. It was published in the book Boys' Bodies: Speaking the Unspoken [© Peter Lang] and further details of this book can be found at: http://www.peterlang.com
Exploring Male Femininity in the `Crisis: Men and Cosmetic Surgery
Playing with Fire: Masculinity, Health, and Sports Supplements
Canadian men flock to gyms to enlarge, reshape, and sculpt their bodies. Fitness centers, health-food stores, muscle magazines, and Internet sites profit by aggressively selling “sports supplements” to a wide range of exercising men. Once associated with only the hardcore factions of male bodybuilders (Klein, 1995), designer protein powders, creatine products, energy bars, ephedrine, amino acids, diuretics, and growth hormones such as androstened…
Active Interview Tactics in Research on Public Deviants: Exploring the Two-Cop Personas
The need to establish and maintain good rapport with interviewees is a methodological axiom supported by most social scientists. Some say we place unnecessary limits on data collection, however, when respondents' statements are simply accommodated. More innovative approaches are especially needed to account for varying roles and their narratives, as Goffman would have it, at different frontstage and backstage levels. Sociological focus on tolerab…
Physical Cultural Studies [Redux]
Congratulations to the editors and the contributing authors to this special edition of the Sociology of Sport Journal for deftly underscoring the promises and prospects of physical cultural studies (PCS). As a self-identified PCS enthusiast, I applaud their probing, thought-provoking and penetrative analyses of the emerging field. While PCS is a nascent field of inquiry, it is never too premature for boundaries, parameters, mandates and definitio…
Tattooing and Civilizing Processes: Body Modification as Self‐control
Malgré la révolution en cours dans le tatouage en Amérique du Nord, les universitaires restent attachés à l'idée que les « fanatiques du tatouage » seraient des inadaptés sociaux. Dans cet article, des données obtenues au cours d'une observation participante de trois ans parmi des fanatiques du tatouage au Canada ouvrent la porte à une critique des interprétations psycho‐sociales privilégiées du tatouage comme étant une conduite irrationnelle, im…
Against the Odds: Retrenchment in Agriculture in France and the United States
This article extends recent work on a comparative theory of retrenchment in social policy by asking whether the politics of retrenchment travels well across policy areas, with policy feedback remaining a crucial variable for explaining government success or failure. The article analyzes policy change in agriculture in the United States and France, a natural choice for an extension of retrenchment theory because agricultural policy resembles socia…
Politicians, the Public and Political Ethics: Worlds Apart
Increased regulation of political ethics has not produced a growing satisfaction with the conduct of politics or the behaviour of politicians. We examine the proposition that regulation produces a convergence of attitudes and expectations between politicians and the public in the realm of political ethics. A distinction is drawn between political ethics conceived as a policy issue and as a process issue. Two models based on that distinction are d…
Male Athletes and the Cult(ure) of Thinness in Sport
Although female emaciators and anorexics in sport have received considerable academic attention as a deviant population of athletes (Atkinson 2008 ——— . 2008 . "Triathlon, Suffering and Exciting Significance." Leisure Studies 27 : 165 – 180 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Grieve 2007 Atkinson , M. 2007 . "Playing with Fire: Masculinity, Health and Sports Supplements." Sociology of Sport Journal 24 : 165 – 186 .[…
Democratic Accountability in Times of Crisis: Executive Power, Fiscal Policy and Covid-19
We examine the performance of four parliamentary democracies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as they confront the need for a substantial fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research covers the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2020. We score the four countries on nine components of democratic accountability using Mark Philp's distinction between formal and political accountability. We conclude, first, that to appreci…
Lindblom’s lament: Incrementalism and the persistent pull of the status quo
Charles Lindblom never abandoned the incremental version of decision-making he introduced in 1959, but as his work progressed he increasingly lamented the impaired quality of inquiry that characterizes public (and private) decision-making. Lindblom did not identify the precise origins of socially created incompetence, but he made it clear that incrementalism is not the source. This article suggests that two lines of intellectual inquiry—one based…
Studying the Canadian Parliament
In recent years the study of the Canadian Parliament has lost some of its original momentum. Major gaps in research have begun to appear, and critics have argued that students of Parliament take a much too docile, uncritical view of parliamentary government as it is practiced in Canada. This article reviews recent research on the Canadian Parliament in light of these criticisms and compares it to more established work on the subject. The prospect…
Straightedge Bodies and Civilizing Processes
Much of the extant popular culture literature points to the nihilistic and present-centred philosophies of material/image consumption common among North American youth enclaves. Few researchers, however, inspect how ascetic youth subcultures on the continent reject mainstream pressures to consume, and perform moral reformist work through the body. In this article, participant observation-based data collected on eastern Canadian practitioners of a…
Reservoir Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Mimesis and Sports-Related Violence
Sociologists have been slow to turn their attention to 'blood sports' involving animals or activities where animals suffer neglect and abuse. Although there seems to be a heightened sense of public contempt in many countries toward the outwardly cruel treatment of animals such as dogs, and toward the place of animals in 'sport' per se, the ways in which racing greyhounds may be enmeshed in wider formations of sports-related abuse and violence con…
Selecting Policy Instruments: Neo-Institutional and Rational Choice Interpretations of Automobile Insurance in Ontario
The rational choice model of politics, which construes important political processes as a series of choices taken by self-interested political actors, has dominated theorizing on the subject of policy instruments in Canada. While useful, this approach is nonetheless limited by its narrow conception of rationality and its inattention to the context of instrument choice. As an alternative, the neo-institutional approach offers a perspective on poli…
The Canadian Legislative System: Politicians and Policy-Making
Hugh Berrington, Backbench Opinion in the House of Commons, 1945–1955. Toronto: Pergamon Press, 1973, pp. x, 265
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Constitutional Conflict in France: Deputies' Attitudes toward Executive-Legislative Relations
The primary purpose of a constitution in a liberal democratic system is to impose restraint on the arbitrary use of power. The favored means of insuring this principle of constitutionalism is a judicious application of the doctrine of separation of powers: a separation which usually includes the functions of government, its agencies, and the individuals who occupy legitimate roles in the government.l Modifications to the constitution are normally…
Policy Interests of Provincial Backbenchers and the Effects of Political Ambition
This article examines the policy interests of backbenchers in the Ontario and Nova Scotia legislatures and tests the hypothesis that the manner in which interests are defined is dependent upon the nature of political ambition. In both provinces those members who aspire to cabinet positions are more inclined than others to defmne their interests in broad terms and to omit any discussion of their constituency in describing their interests. These re…
Toward an institutionalist perspective on regional science: An approach via the regionalization question
Toward an Institutionalist Perspective on Regional Science: An Approach via the Regionalization Question
Comparing Legislatures: The Policy Role of Backbenchers in Ontario and Nova Scotia
Cet article vérifie l'hypothèse selon laquelle les attitudes et les comportements des députés dans un régime parlementaire peuvent se rattacher partiellement à des différences de cadre institutionnel. D'une manière plus précise nous cherchons à déterminer si les membres d'un Parlement de métier, complexe, spécialisé et qui possède un système de commissions autonome ont une façon différente d'aborder les questions politiques que les membres d'un P…
Executive Power and Committee Autonomy in the Canadian House of Commons: Leadership Selection, 1968–1979
L'étude des relations entre le pouvoir exécutif et le pouvoir législatif est souvent ardue parce qu'il est difficile d'évaluer le pouvoir ou l'influence. Nous pouvons contourner une telle difficulté en étudiant, par exemple, l'autorité de l'exécutif sur les nominations des parlementaires aux différents postes de cadres au sein du Parlement. Naturellement si le gouvernement maîtrise parfaitement ces nominations l'autonomie du Parlement est plutôt …
Regime Support in Canada: A Comment
In their article, ‘Some Correlates of Regime Support in Canada’, (this Journal, VIII (1978), 199–216), Allan Kornberg, Harold D. Clarke and Lawrence LeDuc set out to describe ‘the distribution and foundations of public support for the political regime in Canada’ (p. 199). Using the 1974 National Election Study as their data base and regression analysis as their primary technique, they attempt to identify the correlates of regime support and come …
Bureaucratic politics and the new fighter aircraft decisions
According to the bureaucratic politics approach to policy making, an appreciation of competition and conflict among bureaucrats is considered to be critical for an understanding of decision outcomes. In this paper, we employ the bureaucratic politics model to assess the outcomes of the initial phase of the Canadian government's new fighter aircraft (NFA) program, which began in March 1977 with cabinet approval of the procurement and ended in Apri…
Seizing the Future: Opportunities for Canada in the 1980s
The Politics of Canadian Public Policy
On the prospects for industrial policy in Canada
A Primer on the Economics of Industrial Policy . By W.C. W atson . The Challenge of Diversity: Industrial Policy in the Canadian Federation .; By M ichael J enkin . Public Money in the Private Sector . By A llan T upper . Partners in Industrial Strategy: The Special Role of the Provincial Research organizations . By D onald J. L eroy and P aul D ufour
Bureaucrats and Politicians in Canada: An Examination of the Political Administration Model
This article examines the characteristics of the “political administration” in Canada and compares these characteristics with those found in other liberal democratic systems. The findings are based on interviews conducted with 82 federal public officials interviewed in 1982 and 1983. The contact patterns of these public officials and their attitudes toward the personnel and institutions of liberal democracy are studied within the structural conte…
Do We Need a Code of Conduct for Politicians? The Search for an Elite Political Culture of Corruption in Canada
Do we need a code of conduct for politicians, or are the existing unwritten rules a sufficient safeguard against acts of political malfeasance? Based on interviews with 84 backbench MPs, this article examines politicians' informal codes of conduct. The study reveals considerable disagreement in assessments of particular acts, notably those involving conflicts of interest and constituency service. Differences among MPs are related to a number of f…
Public Policies and Political Development in Canada
Plotinus: Ennead V. 1. On the Three Principal Hypostases; A Commentary with Translation
Plotinus: Ennead V.1: On the Three Principal Hypostases
Inside the Industrial Policy Garbage Can: Selective Subsidies to Business in Canada
Cet article dtudie comment les bureaucrates et les hommes politiques essayent de venir a bout des obstacles rencontres lors de la mise en ex6cution des programmes d'assistance selectives aux entreprises. Parce que ces programmes typiquement n'ont pas de raisons d'etre economique et politique precises ils sont souvent diriges par ce que l'on appelle vulgairement 'le modgle poubelle de prise de decision'. En examinant le Programme de Developpement …
Academics and Public Policy: The Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada
Federal State, National EconomyPeter Leslie Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987, pp. xvi, 205
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The State, Business, and Industrial Change in Canada
Through the lens of these sectors Coleman and Atkinson shed considerable light on the intersection of political considerations and policy development, and offer a new base on which to move forward in planning for economic growth.
Selecting Policy Instruments: Neo-Institutional and Rational Choice Interpretations of Automobile Insurance in Ontario
The rational choice model of politics, which construes important political processes as a series of choices taken by self-interested political actors, has dominated theorizing on the subject of policy instruments in Canada. While useful, this approach is nonetheless limited by its narrow conception of rationality and its inattention to the context of instrument choice. As an alternative, the neo-institutional approach offers a perspective on poli…
Strong States and Weak States: Sectoral Policy Networks in Advanced Capitalist Economies
The theme of strong and weak states has recently figured largely in comparative political economy. However, significant variation across sectors in single countries in the degree to which the state is able and willing to intervene in the economy has led to calls for a disaggregated view of the state, with more attention devoted to the different levels – micro, meso, macro – at which the state confronts the economy. The concepts of strength and we…
The State, Business, and Industrial Change in Canada
Political science (58 works) · Sociology (55 works) · Law (44 works) · Law (37 works) · Politics (32 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Economics (21 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Public Administration (19 works) · Public Administration (18 works)