Sounding the alarm: an exploration of professionalization within the Ontario fire service focused on the issues, challenges, pressures, and opportunities for transforming a lauded public sector institution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fire service is highly regarded by the community and is routinely recognised as a highly trusted occupation. The demands placed on the fire service have grown substantially in recent years due to neoliberal pressures, growing fiscal costs, accountability pressures, an expanding emergency response mandate, and the acquisition of additional non-emergency roles. This thesis explores the extent to which these changes are resulting in the professionalisation of the Ontario fire service. It employs historical and sociological institutionalism to examine the Ontario fire service as an institution to understand factors influencing its behaviour and shaping its change mechanisms. It uses related theoretical concepts of institutional agency, path dependence, endogenous and exogenous variables, rule makers versus rule takers, and institutional isomorphism to provide insight on how institutional change occurs or does not occur. This study comprised 24 interviews with leaders from Ontario and international fire services, the Ontario police and paramedic services, senior municipal officials, labour relations experts and higher education professors. The findings of this study suggest that the Ontario fire service may be approaching a critical juncture whereby it is forced to adapt to neoliberal pressures and pressures for occupational change to remain effective and become more professionalised, despite its entrenched nature as a long-standing hierarchically structured but non-professionalised institution. These pressures combined with growing calls for change are challenging the ingrained status quo. This study contributes to the literature on institutionalism and the professions through its exploration of an understudied institution. While the focus is the Ontario fire service, the findings may have implications for other fire services and similar institutions. It finds tensions between pressures for professionalisation on the one hand, and neoliberal fiscal pressures on the other. These complexities contribute to firefighters embodying a quasi-professional status that gains legitimacy from the ‘heroic work’ it undertakes rather than by qualifications or credentials. Furthermore, the post-pandemic workplace and a newer generation of workers are producing institutional pressures that can potentially shift the entrenched fire service. This research sheds light on the Ontario fire service through an academic lens and reveals a complex institution facing a challenging trajectory.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".