Processes of Social Work Engagement with The Reforming State in Australia: The Case of Centrelink
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Processes of social work engagement with the reforming state in Australia: The case of Centrelink This thesis provides an account of processes of social work engagement with the reforming state in Australia. The thesis focuses on the embedding and intensification of activation reforms into income support and employment services policy and the development through new public management (NPM) strategies of an individualised service delivery culture in the Australian federal government agency Centrelink during the period 1997 to the close of 2007. Central to this thesis is an interest in performative aspects of social work identity, as well as ways in which organisational control was pursued through intentional efforts to regulate the identity of its employees to ensure their responsiveness towards achieving contested welfare policy reforms. The study draws upon a particular articulation of the theoretical framework of performativity to explore processes of regulation at the level of the organisation and at the level of individual workers. The study informing this thesis analyses narratives from two sets of agents: politicians and former members of the Centrelink Executive and eleven highly experienced social workers from all levels of the Centrelink hierarchy who participated in the transformation of this public service agency through NPM reform and welfare policy reform process. The focus of the study is on reflexive processes of coming into being, specifically how these two sets of agents interpreted and responded to interactive social and regulative processes of identity formation within this restructured organisational and policy context. The thesis extends current understandings of the effect of ubiquitous NPM and welfare policy reforms on social workers through shedding light on the processes by which social workers become or are produced in particular organisational and policy contexts. This thesis explores the way social work and public service values and commitments were constructed and contested throughout a period of transformational change. Keywords: social work, organisational regulation, Centrelink, performativity
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".