Diminishing the concept of social policy: The shifting conceptual ground of social policy debate in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the struggle in Canada over ideas about social policy. It takes the view that debates held at the meso level of the policy community are important sites for exploring how dominant ideas about social problems and social policy are shaped. This paper examines one specific debate (the late 1990s debate on the national children’s agenda) to explore how the mainstream conceptual ground has shifted. It argues that progressive constructions of the issues and solutions have been increasingly undermined, as an outcome of both the narrow ‘child development’ focus of the debates and the success new actors have had in gaining credibility as voices in the social policy community. The result has been a shift in how dominant social policy actors think about social policy, with the shift gravitating towards a simplistic, individualized, casework model. This new diminished understanding has had implications for narrowing the scope of political debate about social policy in Canada and encouraging the development of policies that fail to address the root problems.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".