“It’s a game, you've got to play the game”: Motivation and ‘Being Employable’ in Ontario Unemployment Supports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis research analyses and explores the ways neoliberal conceptualizations of individual responsibility are embedded in practices of becoming employable.This occurs through provision of employment services, which reflect neoliberalization in funding policy documents.An ethnographic case study was conducted in one agency providing job-seeking assistance and services to unemployed Ontarians in a region experiencing high unemployment.Research methods included participant observation of the processes of service provision, as well as interviews with seventeen unemployed job-seekers.During field research, the concept motivation emerged as a mechanism for filtering whether job-seeking clients are suitable for receiving provincially-funded employment resources.Definitions of motivation in funding policy documents embody a neoliberal rhetoric that positions individuals as 'agents' responsible for enacting willingness and flexibility to engage in the labour market.Findings suggest that definitions and interpretations of the concept motivation lead to practices that delegitimize disincentives to employment, thus exacerbating demotivation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".