| dc.contributor.author | Lloyd, Bethan Alice. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:33:51Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1999 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1999 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ49277 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55658 | |
| dc.description | For the last 10 years, adult educators, social workers, and community workers in Nova Scotia have worked in programs developed to enhance the employability of single mothers receiving social assistance. Gendered assumptions inherent in hegemonic understandings of work ethic and family ethic provide a contradictory conceptual framework within which frontline workers in employability enhancement programs operate. This research, based on interviews, dialogues, and focus groups with 23 women counsellors, instructors, and administrators focuses on their work of mediating social relations between a changing Canadian welfare state and a category of Canadian citizen, single mothers receiving social assistance. | en_US |
| dc.description | Three patterns of socially organized practices emerge in the analysis. Through embodied practices frontline workers orient participants in time and space, dealing with current and past experiences of violence, addictions, ill-health, hunger, cold, and sexuality. Through coordinating practices they administer and manage policies, mandates, files, and forms to construct their program participants as actionable within bureaucratic systems. Through ethical practices they orient themselves toward socio-historically constructed humanist ethics of care, emancipatory ethics of justice, feminist ethics of collective action, and ethics of service and community alliance. Through these sets of practices, frontline workers demonstrate compliance with as well as resistance to the disciplinary control of both program and professional mandates. | en_US |
| dc.description | The complexity and intensity of this mediating work arises from its articulation to socio-historical concepts of citizenship and hegemonic understandings of work ethics and family ethics. Frontline workers who engage in the employability enhancement of single mothers receiving social assistance participate in the categorization of those women as deserving or undeserving of state support, as worthy or unworthy of citizenship based on their successful or unsuccessful achievement of idealized notions of motherhood and waged work. This articulation to citizenship entitlements and responsibilities infuses the work with significance. | en_US |
| dc.description | In the end, this research provides direction for the ongoing professional development of frontline workers expected to effect individual and social change with marginalized populations. These frontline workers have made a commitment to work in settings defined by intractable policy questions, questions that cannot be addressed from the singular perspective of any one group. Their frontline contact with program participants whose categorical citizenship they mediate demands education and training for the reflexive critique that can help them meet the challenges of their work. This research provides an example of how reflexive critique by frontline worker can be fostered; it also makes clear the contribution frontline workers have to make to policy development and analysis. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1999. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Education, Sociology of. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Social Work. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Women's Studies. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Education, Adult and Continuing. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Sociology, Public and Social Welfare. | en_US |
| dc.title | Embodied, coordinating, and ethical practices: Women's frontline work in employability enhancement programs. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
