Understanding How the Discourses of Welfare Impact the Subjectivities of OW Participants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1995 the Progressive Conservative (PC) party of Ontario carried out a series of welfare policy changes impacting the operating principles of social assistance. The PC campaign pledged to cut social assistance benefit levels, implement mandatory workfare, and crack down on welfare fraud. Using a qualitative methodology, this dissertation asks, How does Ontario Works, the accompanying discourse and cultural logic of neoliberal welfare reform, impact the subjectivities of OW participants? A governmentality framework informs this research by placing focus on how we are governed and by what practices (Cruikshank, 1999: 120). The investigation follows a theoretical tradition direct[ing] us to attend to the practices of government that form the basis on which problematizations are made and what happens when we govern and are governed? (Dean, 1999: 28). From an analysis of 24 semi-structured interviews with OW participants in Oxford County, I argue that the regimes of practice (Foucault, 1991: 73-86) associated with Ontario Works and the public words of welfare (Schram, 1995) promoted by the "common sense revolution" operate on a discursive field (Foucault, 2006 [1969]: 30) facilitating a form of prejudice (Allport, 1954) called classism. By examining the workings, effects, and the how? of power (Foucault, 2003: 274) I show that classism survives in the dominant public discourses of welfare reform by way of the cultural categories that undergird the social order(Schram, 2000: 1): namely, that of the lazy welfare recipient and the exploited taxpayer. Consistent with Mullaly, I suggest that Culture is not only received by people, it is produced and reproduced by the same people in everyday life (Mullaly, 2002: 72). Paraphrasing Foucault's seminal insights on power, I will demonstrate that classism, via the mainstream discourses of personal responsibility and excessive taxation, passes through the individuals it has constituted (Foucault, 2003: 30).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".