Suchergebnisse

"This study concerns one department of Canadian government - Employment and Immigration Canada (EIC) - and one policy field - labour market policy - from 1976 to 1991. McElligott unearths resistance in workplaces where 'cutting edge' neoconservative managers have been trying to reshape government services, and inserts front-line workers into state theories, policy debates, and progressive political strategies. He argues that the neglect of these workers makes key state theories incomplete and separates policy-making theory - and practice - from actual state outputs. One consequence is that progressive thinkers and activists have forgone many promising strategic opportunities." "Beyond Service challenges current trends in administrative theory and policy-making, and will be of interest to academics, policy research bodies, union researchers, educators, and, most important, front-line government workers themselves."--Jacket

Despite persistent depictions to the contrary, coercion pervades the modern work experience and, in many significant respects, is underwritten by the power of the state. This article outlines some of the ways in which long-standing interventions by Canadian (and British) states continue to affect workplace relations today. To appreciate the scope of this effect, it is necessary to trespass across a number of disciplinary boundaries to include topics such as immigration, deportation, political policing, the legal foundations of employment law, the continuing influence of the British Poor Laws, and the role of prisons and prison labour in helping to regulate work standards. States acted to support proletarianization in a comprehensive way, but their tendency to favour large-scale, "labour-saving" building projects has often undermined the actual effectiveness of their efforts at social control. These patterns still haunt prison policy, as I will show toward the end of the article in discussing the Toronto South Detention Centre.

This paper critically examines the claim made by Canadian Conservative politicians that prison expansion is likely to produce economic gains for Canadian prison towns. Such claims raise many questions about the actual beneficiaries of prison construction, and the depiction of prisons as "infrastructure" serving some public good or even promoting social justice. After reviewing relevant literature from American debates on this topic, I focus on more specific Canadian conditions, and use public tendering data to trace the path of prison spending. The evidence suggests that prison expansion is unlikely to benefit surrounding communities, although interests elsewhere tend to reap major gains.

This paper critically examines the claim made by Canadian Conservative politicians that prison expansion is likely to produce economic gains for Canadian prison towns. Such claims raise many questions about the actual beneficiaries of prison construction, and the depiction of prisons as "infrastructure" serving some public good or even promoting social justice. After reviewing relevant literature from American debates on this topic, I focus on more specific Canadian conditions, and use public tendering data to trace the path of prison spending. The evidence suggests that prison expansion is unlikely to benefit surrounding communities, although interests elsewhere tend to reap major gains.

Prisons and crime are still widely seen as concerning fields of state action that are distinct from social or labour-market policy. This article looks at the way neoconservative attacks on the remnants of the Keynesian welfare state reflect a 'penal management of poverty' that blurs such distinctions. This approach presages a dramatically increased role for state and state-contracted coercion aimed at labour and the poor. But such escalations do not happen automatically, and are still vulnerable to effective resistance, as this article will show.