The Nation's Gardeners: Social Work Professionalization and Interpretation Work in Scientific Adoption Practice, 1930-1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between scientific knowledge, social work and the social practice of adoption in Ontario, from 1930-1960. It focuses on the role of social workers in public agencies, specifically the Protestant Childrens Aid Societies in Ontario, and voluntary relinquishments by unmarried mothers, within social welfare history. The study uses adoption as a site to explore the professionalization of social work and maintains that adoption was important as a professionalizing project of social workers. \n\tExisting scholarship on the growth of scientific expertise and the professions often overlooks the co-operative work required to make science work. By contrast, this study shows how social workers strengthened their own position by integrating developments in science, psychology and medicine in the management and assessment of adoptions. The dissertation interrogates the processes through which professional adoptions became the norm, by focusing on the processes of translation, interpretation work and boundary work in adoption. These are analyzed as strategies that social workers used to improve their position within the system of professions and make adoption governable. \n\tThe scientific approaches that came to shape social work practice and adoption were shaped by and contributed to nature-nurture debates, challenging narrow hereditarianism. Psychology and child development theories were used by social workers to assess the potential adoptability of children, the fitness of mothers and suitability of adoptive parents, leading to the creation of a new social category--the unadoptable child. \n\tThis study contributes to sociological research in science studies and forms of governance that structured the development of social services. The rise of scientific adoption practice in the post war period coincided with changing notions of the family and the rise of the therapeutic state. The strategies of professionalization used by social workers helped to popularize new forms of knowledge and strengthen the link between the state and bio-medical authority in family making. The study of adoption raises important questions about the extent to which scientific knowledge and techniques can be used as a basis for discerning social obligations and collective responsibilities for those defined as strangers or kin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".