BAKER, Maureen and David TIPPEN, <b>POVERTY, SOCIAL ASSISTANCE, AND THE EMPLOYABILITY OF MOTHERS: RESTRUCTURING WELFARE STATES</b>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BAKER, Maureen and David TIPPEN, POVERTY, SOCIAL ASSISTANCE, AND THE EMPLOYABILITY OF MOTHERS: RESTRUCTURING WELFARE STATES, Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 316 pp., $24.95 softcover / $60.00 hardcover. Reviewed by: MELINDA MILLS The rhetoric of welfare state restructuring such as `reduction of the public debt', `cutting costs of social programs' or `getting people back to work' to `encourage independence' has crept into media, political, and policy debates in many industrialised countries. When searching for ways to cope with rising costs and structural changes that coincide with greater economic globalization, predominance of market capitalism and labour-market flexibility, governments have turned to the reduction of benefits of certain groups of individuals who are viewed as 'abusing' the welfare system, such as long term beneficiaries, which often include low income mothers with young children. The subsequent adoption of neo-liberal terminology signals a focus on efficiency, cost-effectiveness, lowering public expenditures and providing 'incentives' to work, with the state positioned as a residual player or `last resort', leaving responsibility to the individual and thus downplaying structural barriers to employment. The ability to sell unpalatable cuts and reforms to the public has meant a transformation of rhetoric via the introduction of seemingly positive phrases such as `employability enhancement incentives' or punitive and moralistic terms, like 'dependency'. Baker and Tippin take on this timely topic by focusing on the restructuring of social programs for low-income mothers in the four liberal welfare regimes of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, The first chapter sets the stage for the book followed by a gendered theoretical approach to welfare state restructuring in chapter 2. The next four chapters explore the process of reform in each country outlining a brief history of social program development for low-income mothers, justification of restructuring, and the interaction between social policies and programs with political structures, pressure group activities and economic and labour-market shifts. The final chapter provides a summary of welfare-state restructuring and the 'poverty of employability'. Baker and Tippin offer several new insights to this field of research, which are presented with both elegance and evidence. First, they successfully introduce a long overdue gendered approach to welfare state restructuring, which is a highly effective combination of feminist and political-economy perspectives that remains clearly rooted in the study of inequality. For instance, our attention is drawn to the striking absence of acknowledgement of women's diverse needs and circumstances in androcentfic documents. …
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.007 |
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".