later, switched to Sociology – becoming the school's first appointment in the field. Eventually he was told that to retain his job he would have to get a graduate degree or begin publishing in a meaningful way. As such, in the early 1950s, he began the project that, fifteen years later, would culminate in the production of The Vertical Mosaic. The idea for the project had found its genesis at the LSE where, he had told his PhD supervisor, he wanted to "write an interpretation of Canada as a modern democracy." Vertical mosaic The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada, Porter's most important work, was published in 1965 by University of Toronto Press. It was the study of equality of opportunity and the exercise of power by bureaucratic, economic and political elites in Canada. Porter was concerned with challenging the image that Canada was a classless society with "no barriers to opportunity." Porter concludes The Vertical Mosaic with the following observations: Porter argues that Marxist class analysis, based on ownership of the means of production is a "questionable criterion of class in modern industrial society" (p. 25). Porter rejects power as the basis for social class, with the observation that conflict between those with power and the powerless is nonexistent. Porter constructs a new model based on the study of elites. Elites are those who make decisions in the hierarchical institutional systems of modern society. Porter describes elites in the following way: Legacy Porter's analysis is essentially conflict theorist. While some aspects were inspired by Marxist thinking, he was at pains to present a non-Marxian approach. The nature of the Canadian capitalist class led Porter to develop his model. Notably, it was against his work that scholars in the 1970s began to develop a more contemporary, cultural and Marxist idea of class that defined it not in terms of occupational rank but in terms of power relationships. Indeed, if there is one area of Porter's work which intellectuals are most critical of it is his overly functionalist definition of class and power that closes down other avenues of critical thought: as Pat Armstrong writes, "by conceptualizing class in this manner, Porter left out of the theory many of the ways power is used to ensure male dominance in class relations and how those relations shift over time, often through struggle." He noted that this class