From Neoliberalism To The Symbolic Exchange of Care: COVID-19 and Representations of Later Life in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Developing and extending radical Durkheimian sociology, this dissertation examines individual and collective representations shaping the constitution of retirement, old age, and aging (ROAA) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada. The research employs contextual and semiological analyses of culture found in news media, and a photovoice study with six participants aged 70+ about the impact of retirement and the pandemic on their social identities. The findings of this multimethod approach reveal tensions and contradictions about ROAA in the conscience collective. While the pandemic brought substantial changes to the everyday lives of older persons, the underlying neoliberal order that prioritizes individual responsibility, productivity, and the perpetual deferral of dependency persisted, continuing to shape cultural attitudes, judgments, perceptions, and social practices related to later life. In effect, the pandemic is a catalyst, again intensifying and revealing enduring moral imperatives about ROAA, structured through a social binary that contrasts the heroic, self-sufficient neoliberal older subject with the abject dependent. These moral threads illustrate how neoliberal cultural logic continues to shape the symbolic, material, and experiential framing of later life. The valorization of productivity and self-management, coupled with the marginalization of those deemed “burdens” on the socioeconomic order, creates continual pressure on older persons to prove their capacity to embody the heroic ideal, driven by the fear of slipping into the abject position. Neoliberal cultural logic erodes the social mechanisms for altruistic forms of care, reconstituting these practices into a form of fatalistic altruism, where care becomes transactional and governed by capitalist principles. The analysis destabilizes the hegemony of neoliberal rationality, creating a discursive space to re-articulate socio-political frameworks about dependency and care in line with radical Durkheimianism. This dissertation develops an alternative symbolic exchange of care approach that re-imagines care in light of the fundamental societal need for non-economic social relations, interdependency, and reciprocal moral obligation. Such social conditions also facilitate the realization of core aspects of social democracy and social rights that can serve as a framework for policy development, cultural attitudes, morality, and justice. The symbolic exchange of care framework subjects the commodification of care to sociological critique and encourages exploring contemporary practices and rituals that support genuine social solidarity.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".