Old Lessons for New Governance: Safety or Profit and the New Conventional Wisdom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New governance theory has a large following in academia and is exerting an influence in numerous spheres of regulatory policy.Yet in the area of occupational health and safety, new governance is hardly new at all.Indeed, it is fair to say that it in many ways what are now labelled new governance concepts were first articulated and applied in the 1972 Robens Report, Safety and Health at Work.This included its critique of command and control legislation and its emphasis on the need to develop better self--regulation.This paper critically examines new governance models in OHS regulation.In the first part, I construct some ideal types of OHS regimes based on three variables; state protection, worker participation and employer management systems.These are used as heuristics in subsequent discussion.The second part briefly discusses the roots of new governance in the Robens report (referred to as 'old' new governance) and briefly reviews Ontario's experience with it, to examine its dynamics and its vulnerability to regress toward neo-liberal self regulation/ paternalism in the absence of effective worker OHS activism .In part three, I focus on recent work by two North American new governance theorists, Orly Lobel and Cynthia Estlund, who consciously wish avoid a collapse of new governance approaches into neo--liberal self regulation/paternalism.I argue that despite their aspirations, the new governance prescriptions they embrace are unlikely to be institutionalized with the protective conditions they advocate and that their emphasis on self--regulation valorizes a movement toward the destination they wish to avoid.Finally, I ask whether degradation toward neo--liberal self--regulation/paternalism is inevitable and if not whether a progressive new governance theory is possible and has anything to offer toward strengthening a regime of public regulation under the unfavourable conditions that prevail today.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".