The restructuring of the child welfare system in Ontario: a study in the social organization of knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study describes the social organization of the child protection system in Ontario after the introduction of the “Child Welfare Reform.” The study explores and describes the new “regimes of practices” that bind the child welfare social worker into producing institutional outcomes. There have been significant changes to social work practices as a result of this restructuring. Of particular concern is the considerable reduction in the professional autonomy of social workers and a removal of major decision-making powers from front-line social workers and supervisors. The study explores the increase in the emphasis on social workers' accountability to the system itself and a corresponding decrease in professional autonomy and the commitment to the clients' needs. Procedures and the documentation of social workers' actions and decisions become more important than their relationships with clients and community. The study uses Institutional Ethnography, a method of inquiry developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith, complemented with the literature on governmentality. I draw on my knowledge and experience of the routine every day work of child protection and how new “technologies of government” such as the New Funding Formula and the Ontario Risk Assessment Model (ORAM) have affected the practices of the restructured child protection system.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".