Connected Yet Disconnected: New Public Management and Labour Expropriation within Public Employment Services Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines public employment services in Ontario from the standpoint of those who deliver the services. There is a paucity of empirical research in this particular field of public service delivery, specifically Canadian based research that focuses on the work of the employment specialists who are client-facing workers. The thesis distinctly applies Marxist Labour Process Theory and Foucauldian Governmentality to explicate the work experiences of employment specialists in Ontario’s current iteration of public employment services, Employment Ontario (EO), while taking into consideration the transitions of the EO labour process. In researching public employment services in advanced neoliberal capitalist countries, such as Canada, New Public Management (NPM) is likely unavoidable and is a focal point in this analysis. The thesis presents NPM as a systemic outgrowth of neoliberal governance and as a mechanism by which the government seeks to control-manage vulnerable people and public resources through the imposition of for-profit-businesslike practices in public service administration and delivery. With EO, NPM governance stretches to not-for-profit (NFP) work, and stimulates a drift from NFP social economy values. The current EO service delivery network predominantly consists of publicly-funded NFP organizations. This research takes a distinct focus in how it applies a unique analytic framework while it simultaneously seeks to fill a gap in public employment services and NFP research. Using qualitative interview data from thirty-two research participants, this thesis analyzes the work, identity, and behaviours of NFPs and their EO employment specialists, as well as the current outgoing and incoming funding structures of EO. It highlights the intended and unintended consequences of operationalizing public employment services through market-based policies and practices. The thesis concludes by providing a discussion on pathways to extend this study and alternative policies and practices that challenge the current businesslike approach to the administration and delivery of public employment services in Canada.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".