Sociology professor emeritus Roderic Beaujot recently received the 2015 Lifetime Contribution Award, presented by the Canadian Population Society.
The Lifetime Contribution Award recognizes “a Canadian scholar every two years who has shown outstanding commitment to the profession of demography and whose cumulative work has contributed in important ways to the advancement of the discipline in Canada, through publications, teaching and/or service.”
With a PhD in Sociology from University of Alberta (1975), Beaujot started his career as a demographer with Statistics Canada (1974-76). Soon afterward, he joined Western. From the latter 1970s through to the present, Beaujot established an outstanding career in terms of research, administration and training over a period now spanning four decades. His research interests include the evolving demographics of Canada and implications for social policy in areas of family, health, labour force, pensions, education and social security.
Since 2011, he is professor emeritus of Sociology, member of the Centre for Population, Aging and Health, and Director of the Research Data Centre at Western until 2014.
Ellen Gee, a former Simon Fraser University Sociology professor, wrote in her appraisal of Beaujot’s award-winning Earning and Caring in Canadian Families:
“While lip service is often given to the relations between production and reproduction, these are rarely analyzed through the interplay of family and work, at both the macro and micro levels of analysis. The general theoretical orientation based on the tension between caring and earning provides a useful and interesting way to understand much of contemporary family life and family policy. By defining families as comprised of people who come together in instrumental and expressive activities, specifically in earning a living and caring for each other, Roderic Beaujot provides much insight into the dynamics of gender, family, and work, along with much supporting evidence for the stability and change in these dynamics in Canadian society. In the Porter tradition, Beaujot pays much attention to the various bases for inequality, including inequality by gender. He highlights the ways in which the interplay of family and work, and the division of productive activities, need to be central to our understanding of gender inequalities and stratification. This brings him to policy orientations that seek to establish greater common ground across gender and a more equitable balance of paid and unpaid work between women and men.”