Injured Workersâ Moral Engagement in the Compensation System: The Social Production of Problematic Claiming Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A small proportion of compensation claims in Ontario are complex, prolonged, and often adversarial. These claims are associated with chronic disability, unemployment, and financial and emotional suffering for injured workers, and significant financial and administrative burden for the compensation system. This thesis employed a critical interpretive qualitative design to better understand sociologically the issue of ‘problematic claiming’ from the standpoint of injured workers. A key finding is that injured workers engage with the compensation system morally, framing their experience of claiming in terms of right and wrong, just and unjust, good and bad. Their experience is characterized by mistrust, confrontation with system players, feelings of dehumanization and judgement. Injured workers in this study responded to their moral experience of claiming through the performance of ‘identity work’: attempts at reputation repair that involved displaying their status as ‘good workers’ and ‘good claimants’. This thesis elaborates on this central finding and explores what might produce injured workers’ moral engagement in compensation by considering three social discursive contexts that may play a role in shaping the system and the understandings and practices of those within it: the injured worker movement’s ‘justice discourse’, and the broader societal-level discourses of sick role and neoliberalism. This analysis contributes to both the substantive field of work and health and the theoretical field of social theory. The findings illuminate the tensions and related consequences that arise from the differing conceptions of claiming between injured workers and the compensation board. Highlighting the value of applying concepts from the social sciences to the study of the relationship between work and health, the research underscores the continued and expanded usefulness of sick role theory in contemporary studies of health and illness behavior, and provides empirical substance for understanding the notion of moral in sociological terms.
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 | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".