Public Works : State Formation, Class Composition, and the Making of Ontario’s Public Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of labour in the formation of a modern public sector in Ontario.Specifically, I explore how the public sector has been rendered intelligible and administrable through strategies of 'government at a distance,' which have aimed to disentangle labour from its strategic location in vital infrastructural networks, enabling its regulation through increasingly centralized administrative structures.I draw from three historical case studies in developing my argument.First, I examine how civic employees' unions contributed to the reconfiguration of sanitation work in early twentieth century Toronto.Second, I explore how the federation of public sector unions on a provincial and national scale in part provoked the emergence of regional governance structures across the province in the 1940s and 1950s.Finally, I explore how interest arbitration was taken up as a means of depoliticizing the bargaining process in Ontario's hospital sector through the 1960s and 1970s, galvanizing new understandings of the public sector as a distinctive domain.In each of these cases, I explore how new forms of expertise were developed which aimed to impartially calculate the value of public work and render it comparable across disparate sites.In this sense, I draw from Foucault in viewing the formation of a public sector as a process of 'governmentalization' --setting up an economy at the level of the entire state.While a great deal of literature in governmentality studies has tended to focus on the role of state officials in this process, I emphasize how workers, at various times, have been able to build leverage through their critical position in the provision of services, and change the scale at which their labour is framed through establishing new levels of organization.In this sense, I argue that the formation of the public sector a uniform and coherent domain has in many ways been the outcome of struggles from below.In other words, workers have played a very active role in the production of the public sector.On paper, the current period often seems bleak.We are living in an era of austerity in which everything appears scarce.There is not enough time or money; there are not enough jobs or natural resources.We need to always be cutting back, tightening the belt.But I feel very fortunate to be part of this moment in time.Far from scarcity, I know that there is a great abundance, because I've experienced it with all of the fantastic people that I've met.They've helped me to think and act with a feeling of fullness -to understand that there's always more than we're told.Ultimately, that gives me hope and energy.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".