Rianne Mahon

Standardizing and Disseminating Knowledge: The Role of the OECD in Global Governance

If ‘knowledge is power’, it is unsurprising that the production, legitimation, and application of social scientific knowledge, not least that which was designed to harness social organization to economic growth, is a potentially contentious process. Coping with, adapting to, or attempting to shape globalization has emerged as a central concern of policy-makers who are, therefore, interested in knowledge to assist their managerial activities. Thus, an organization that can create, synthesize, legitimate, and disseminate useful knowledge can play a significant role in the emerging global governance system. The OECD operates as one important site for the construction, standardization, and dissemination of transnational policy ideas. OECD staff conducts research and produces a range of background studies and reports, drawing on disciplinary knowledge (typically economics) supplemented by their ‘organizational discourses’. This paper probes the contested nature of knowledge production and attempts to evaluate the impact of the OECD’s efforts to produce globally applicable policy advice. Particular attention is paid to important initiatives in the labour market and social policy fields – the Jobs Study and Babies and Bosses.

NAFTA, the Redesign, and the Rescaling of Canada's Welfare State

The first two papers in this issue emphasize the importance of politics and class relations within Canada as an explanatory factor, as compared to relations of dependency with the United States. In “NAFTA, the Redesign, and Rescaling of Canada’s Welfare State,” Robert Johnson and Rianne Mahon argue that the Canadian welfare state regime has converged towards the US model since the Free Trade Agreement, but that forces linked to continental integration have not been the primary cause. Rather, the process of welfare state design and rescaling has shown common features in both countries and allows for progressive, politically contingent possibilities. The authors distinguish between two ways of connecting Labour market policy and social policy — the “workfare/duty state” model and a more progressive “social investment” model based on active state support for caring services and lifelong learning. In both countries, the former model has been most powerful but the latter has been more influential in Canada, particularly at the subnational level.

The Jobs Strategy: From neo- to inclusive liberalism?

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the OECDs Strategy, which became a principal means for the OECD to promote a neo-liberal model of social and employment policy to its member states and it also influenced the European Unions employment strategy. Yet important modifications were introduced in 2006 with the recognition of an alternative policy path, ‘flexicurity.’ While the latter accepted neoliberal macroeconomic ‘fundamentals,’ it broke with neoliberalism to the extent that it recognized a positive role for labour market regulations and social policies in promoting security and social inclusion. The paper analyses the politics associated with this shift, using the concept of ‘organisational discourse’ to get at the dynamic (and contested) nature of the OECDs ideational lens. While the OECD came under pressure from some of its member states to alter its ‘one size fits all’ strategy, the Economics Department, whose version of the discourse initially dominated, was also challenged from within by the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA), which developed its own alternative discourse.

Challenging National Regimes From Below: Toronto Child-Care Politics

In Canada, as in the United States, the postwar welfare regime recognized the citizenship of the male breadwinner while women, for the most part, remained second-class citizens. This was reflected, inter alia, in Canadas child-care policy, a federal-provincial cost-sharing arrangement that provided subsidies to low-income families able to demonstrate their need, rather than as a public service available to all those who want and need it. While this meant that the Canadian state did not guarantee the right to affordable child care, these intergovernmental arrangements also offered feminists opportunities to challenge federal policy at the provincial and local level. This article examines child-care politics in Toronto, Canadas largest city and the first one in Canada to have a municipal child-care program. It shows how, in the 1970s, Toronto began to break with the liberal assumptions that characterized its past policies. Torontos child-care program also posed a potential challenge to the national and provincial regimes. This, however, required the movement to secure changes at the provincial and/or federal level, which it thus far has failed to do.

Swedish Model Dying of Baumols? Current Debates

In New Political Economy’s special issue on small states in world markets, Sven Steinmo concluded that ‘the Swedish model (which comprises corporatist decision-making institutions, solidaristic wages policies and perhaps even the “politics of compromise”) may well now be dead. But the ambition and the political support for a largely egalitarian policy with a very large welfare state (and the taxes to support it) live on quite healthily in Sweden today.’ This contrasts with Torben Iversen and Anne Wren’s prognosis for the Scandinavian social democratic model as it confronts the ‘post-industrial trilemma’. For them, Denmark’s experiences reflect the problems all Scandinavian welfare states will run up against – tax revolts and growing divisions between high-skilled workers in the export sector (largely male) and ‘low-skilled’ public sector workers (largely female), a division increasingly expressed in politics as well as in collective bargaining. The model cannot survive: either equality or full employment has to be sacrificed. What was, in large part, a debate among academics has now gained a certain political currency in Sweden, with the publication of the 2003–2004 Long Term Forecast. The Forecast shares the assumption underlying Iversen and Wren’s trilemma – that of Baumol’s ‘cost disease’ arising out of the growing productivity gap between the goods-producing and service sectors. It argued that Sweden can no longer afford publicly to finance high-quality, universally accessible social services: the combination of growing demand as a result of to an ageing population and Baumol’s cost disease will necessarily generate a shift to public provision of a basic level of service, allowing markets and families to pick up the rest. If this prescription is accepted, then Steinmo’s optimistic prognosis will no longer be justified. The model will indeed be dead.

Poverty Policy and Politics in Canada and Mexico: “Inclusive” Liberalism?

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to bring prosperity and well-being to the peoples of Canada and Mexico. It has perhaps contributed to growth in both countries over the last decade, but the fruits of that growth have been very unevenly distributed. In contrast with the vision of “Social Europe” incorporated in the European Union, NAFTA was and remains a neoliberal form of continental economic governance. As such, it contributes to pressures on Canada and Mexico to restructure their social policies to become competitive in a continental market dominated by the United States. As discussed in the chapter by Mary Hawkesworth in this volume, the latter has never had a strong welfare state and, since the Reagan era, even limited existing welfare policies have been subject to substantial retrenchment. The question this chapter addresses is to what extent North American integration has pushed Canada and Mexico to follow suit, embracing a punitive workfare approach to poverty alleviation typical of neoliberal America?

Industry, the state, and the new protectionism: textiles in Canada and France

In this article we address two questions pertinent to the debate on the relationship between industrial restructuring and the new protectionism. First, does the appearance of industry-specific trade barriers necessarily indicate an attempt to preserve those traditional sectors in which advanced capitalist states no longer enjoy a comparative advantage? Second, are all advanced capitalist states equally susceptible to protectionist pressures or will neomercantilist states, given their established capacity for sectoral intervention, find such pressures easier to resist than their liberal counterparts? After analyzing recent changes in textile technology and in the pattern of international competition in the textile industry, we examine the response of two states—the relatively liberal Canadian state and the neomercantilist French state—to this complex set of changes. The textile case indicates that it is a mistake to assume that states have but two options: protect or adjust. Links may be established between hightechnology and traditional industries that make it possible for inputs from the former to restore the competitive position of the latter. If such links are forged, then states may use trade barriers to allow producers time to adjust. French and Canadian textile policies reveal the conditions under which such states, although constrained by established policy networks, are nevertheless induced to respond in similar fashions to contemporary changes in the world economy.

Political Sociology: Canadian Perspectives

This important work presents an extensive review of the debated issues, the useful methodologies, and the analytical orientations adopted by major Canadian political sociologists. Indeed, it is an essential source for courses in political sociology and Canadian politics.

Work-Family Tensions and childcare. Reflections on Latin American Experiences

The issues raised by tensions between work and family life have been on the agenda in Western Europe and North America for several decades. Work-family tensions are not, however, confined to North America and Western Europe. The issue is also of growing importance in the Global South. Moreover, just as the European Union and the OECD have helped to draw the attention of European and North American states and publics to work-family issues, so, too, have international organisations helped to shape policy agendas in Latin America. This paper reflects on the advice tendered by the World Bank and examines recent policy developments in several Latin American countries whose welfare regimes bear marked similarities to those of Southern Europe. Particular attention is paid to changing childcare arrangements in countries that once relied primarily on families (i.e. mothers) for provision.

Integrating the social into CEPAL’s neo-structuralist discourse

This article focuses on the incorporation of the social into the economic development discourse(s) of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). Since its inception, CEPAL has played an important role in the region. In the postwar period, CEPAL helped to develop the theoretical justification for the import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) then sweeping the region. In response to the dismantling of ISI in the 1980s, CEPAL developed its neo-structuralist alternative. It is argued that the eventual incorporation of a social dimension into its neo-structuralist discourse occurred in response to the shifts in the global universe of social policy discourse as well as the failure of neo-liberal structural adjustment to deliver the promised benefits, documented by CEPAL’s Social Development Division.