The Social Service Industrial Complex: Exploring the Supportive and Obstructive Factors of Critical Youth Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Youth work offers dynamic and rewarding experiences for frontline workers; however, the contestation between the prioritization of communal and neoliberal notions of equity create tensions within the youth sector. While youth workers benefit from reciprocal, fulfilling and transformational elements in their work which align with their vocation and values, a critical analysis of may expose layers of structural violence, including chronic precarity, overwork, moral distress, underappreciation, tokenization, and silencing. These contradictory dynamics can limit the full potential of youth worker’s critical impact, which seeks to support and advocate for social justice on a communal and systemic level in addition to providing interpersonal services. To explore how the social service sector can better optimize policy and practice while reaffirming frontline worker’s ethical principles of equity, this study investigates how youth workers in Central Ontario navigate factors that support and obstruct their critical (anti- oppressive) practices. Grounded in historical and socio-political contexts, this research examines twenty-five semi-structured interviews utilizing Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022/2024). Incorporating the concepts of Critical Pedagogy (Freire, 1970/2000) and praxis to examine the supportive factors, and Structural Violence (Galtung, 1969) and apraxis to examine the obstructive factors, this study presents a discursive model which combines theoretical frameworks with lived experience. The findings of this study provide a model that illustrates the dynamic relationship between five principles of critical practice (relational, holistic, responsive, transformational, and reflexive) and twelve supportive and obstructive factors that have a significant impact on critical youth work. By grounding these lived experiences in shared conceptual language to deconstruct dynamics of the “Social Service Industrial Complex,” this dissertation presents implications for critical praxis in research, policy and practice.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".