François Lachapelle (蓝不反) is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology. He spent several years in China perfecting his language skills before joining the department for his graduate work in 2011.

François is the co-founder and lead data scientist at relational-academia, an innovative higher education data start-up. He is also a research fellow with the Center for Chinese Research (CCR) at the Institute of Asian Research (UBC) and the Higher Education Research Group (UBC).

Read his data-driven experimental thoughts about the structure of academic life and scientific fields on his blog —> bibliometrica-experimental 

Research Interest

• Sociology of Intellectual/Academic Life
• Social Network Analysis and Relational Paradigm
• Computational Social Science, Big Data, and Python
• Modern China, Discourse of “China-Threat” & Post-Mao Intellectual History (中国当代思想史)
• Work, Labor Market, & Status/Prestige in Higher Education
• Sociology and History of Social Sciences & STS
• Critical Bibliometrics

Research Projects

I-Burrisian Networks of PhD Exchanges [Doctoral Project —> FIELD]

Theoretical statement about the working of English-speaking academic field’s market mechanisms (i.e. hiring) and professorial rank’s reproduction either take a relational or an attribute-based direction to explain PhDs outcome on labor market. My dissertation project shows how the relational paradigm’s network-structural stream give credence to Burris’s academic caste system and networks of PhD exchanges. My work built on FIELD, the largest quantitative dataset on university professoriate in English-speaking countries (54 countries; Commonwealth + US) collected to date. FIELD census has a complete list of faculty members working in more than 3, 000 PhD-granting schools.

Relational Position

The relational position argues that faculty member’s prestige/status of doctoral origin can largely predict alone departmental prestige (Burris, 2004). Such robust finding was later used (and to some extend is present in Burris’ work itself) to infer about the working of academic hiring process itself. That is, if doctoral origin as social capital can explain 84% of departmental prestige, then one may think doctoral prestige itself can be a key marker in scholarly adjudicatory process—so called pure prestige effect. Yet put differently, status of doctoral origin/position of doctoral school in academic field alone is the single most important force in shaping PhD holder’s fate on the academic job market. Early findings from the classic era of Mertonian sociology of science also points in that direction.

Attribute Position

Headworth and Freese (2015) recently argued against Burris’s presumed pure prestige position. For them, one doesn’t need the historical metaphor of caste system to understand PhDs’ outcome on the job market. They argued that cumulative advantages and scholarly achievements—at the individual level—can help explain who gets the job. According to this attribute-based position, the effect of prestige/status of doctoral origin doesn’t play out as pure prestige, rather, it is a signal of quality backed up by noteworthy achievements during graduate training (i.e. awards, prize, sole-authorship publication, flagship publication). Measured against the scholarly portfolio of the pool of all other potential applicants for academic job market, Headworth and Freese (2015) found that those hired were more likely to have obtained such symbolic capital during their schooling.

II-Relational Academia [RA] (2011-ongoing; with Patrick John Burnett)

Current research initiatives are seeking to go beyond the discourse of ‘crisis’ in Canadian academia by documenting the occupational plurality that characterizes the career trajectory of PhDs after graduation (CAGS, TRaCE, HEQCO). With research largely focused on tracing where Canadian PhDs work—either within or outside universities— there has been minimal systematic data collection about the trajectory of PhDs working as social scientists in Canadian Academia over the last 50 years. In response, Relational Academia [RA] created the largest dataset to date detailing the trajectories of full-time faculty employed in social science disciplines at Canada’s 15 top research-intensive universities (U15) between 1978 and 2015. The objective of [RA] are three-fold: (1) Longitudinal documentation of attributes (e.g. education, gender, publication record, mobility, promotion patterns, etc.) of PhDs who “make it” on the tenure track in Canadian academia. (2) Systematic network maps showing the active and passive ties between Canadian and international PhD-granting universities. (3) Critical and theory-driven engagement with broader narratives around Canadian universities’ positions within global social science and scientific fields beyond the core-periphery framework.

Research page: www.relational-academia.ca
Twitter: @relational_flow

III-Book Project: Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream (SSHRC-Funded, 2014-2018)

Project that examines intellectual life in China since the 1990s—chiefly the efforts by public intellectuals to rethink China’s past, present, and future in light of the failures of Mao’s revolution, the challenges emerging from reform, and the rise of China to the status of world economic power. The starting point for the project is our respect for the quality of thinking and writing we find in Chinese discourse; Chinese scholars, having benefited from China’s openness to the West and the relative relaxation of political pressure in China (until recently), have much to say about China and the world that merits our attention. Lead Investigators Timothy Cheek (UBC), David Ownby (Montreal) and Joshua Fogel (York)) with two main Chinese collaborators Xu Jilin and Yu Jing (East Normal University, Shanghai) and five graduate Chinese students based at Tsinghua University and East Normal University.

Research Awards (Selected)

Has received over $250,000 in scholarships and research grants over the last 8 years.

• UBC Public Scholars Initiative, 2016-2017

• SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Fellowship, 2011-2012.

• Canada-China Scholars’ Exchange Program Fellowship, 2009-2010.

Publications

Lachapelle, F. and P. J. Burnett. (2018). “Replacing the Canadianization Generation: An  Examination of Faculty Composition from 1977 through 2017.” Canadian Review of Sociology, 55(1): 44-66.

• 2017 Best Overall Student Paper, Canadian Sociological Association, Toronto.

Lachapelle, F. and P. J. Burnett. (2018). “Between Domesticity and  Globality: The Unclear Internationalization Quest of Canadian Universities.” Global Dialogue 8(1).

Shi, A., F. Lachapelle, and M. Galway. (2018). “The Recasting of Chinese Socialism: The Chinese New Left Since 2000.” China Information, 32(1): 139-159.

• First written in Chinese language.

Lachapelle, François. (2016). “The Genesis of a Chinese Public Sociologist.” Global Dialogue 6(2): 23-24.

• Contribution invitation by M. Burawoy.

Manuscript(s) Under Review

{Sole author} “Media Securitizer and the China-Threat – Ascension, Peak, and Downfall.” Journal of Contemporary China

Manuscript(s) in Preparation

{Sole author} “Shen Yuan, Public Sociology, and Nameless Marxism in Post-Mao China.” For Chinese Perspective.

{with Adam Howe} “Big Data’s Ex-Machina Redux: What about Computational Social Science?” For Annual Review of Sociology.

Conference Presentations

April 2018 — “Who Gets the Job? A Look into the Structure of Canadian Academia”, Beyond The Professoriate Research & Innovation Series. Toronto, Canada. Invited Panelists with Patrick J. Burnett.

May 2017 — “Evidence of a de-Canadianization in select U15 Social Science Departments,” Canadian Sociological Association – Sociology of Education Roundtable, Toronto, Canada.

May 2017 — “Canadianization Movement, American Imperialism, and Scholastic Stratification: Professorial Evidence from 1977 to 2017,” Toronto, Canada.

January 2017 — “Homo Academicus: “Who gets the job?”,”  Engaging Education for Public Good. PhDs Go Public Event. UBC Learning Commons, Vancouver      DES  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18zT4VTY8xI (Starts at 1:02:37)

August 2016 — “From Nameless Marxist to Public Sociology: The Liminal Trajectory of Yuan Shen in Contemporary China”, American Sociological Association Public Sociology Panel, Seattle, U.S.A.

June 2016 — “The Canadianization Movement Revisited: Canadian Professoriate, Envy-League, and the Social Sciences”, Canadian Sociological Association, Calgary, Canada.

June 2016 — “From Nameless Marxist to Public Sociology: The Liminal Trajectory of Yuan Shen in Contemporary China”, Canadian Sociological Association, Calgary, Canada.

August 2015 — “Sino Academicus: Towards Mapping Fields of Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China”, Book Project Working Group ‘Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream’, UBC, Vancouver, Canada.

March 2011 — “Avant l’Héritage et la Critique: l’École de Qinghua et la Sociologie Pratique de la Civilisation Communiste”, (Re)faire la Sociologie: Entre Héritage et Critique, Colloque des Cycles Supérieurs de Sociologie, Montreal, Canada.