A NEW VISION FOR A NEW AGE?

A NEW VISION FOR A NEW AGE?A New Social Vision for Canada? Perspectives on the Federal Discussion Paper on Social PolicyReform by Keith Banting; Ken Battle; Remaking Canadian Social Policy: Social Security in theLate 1990s by Jane Pulkingham; Gordon Ternowetsky; Progress without People: NewTechnology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance by David F. Noble; The End ofWork: The Decline of the Global Labour Force and the Dawn of the Post-Ma ...Review by: Patrick KeransCanadian Social Work Review / Revue canadienne de service social, Vol. 13, No. 1(Winter/hiver 1996), pp. 125-130Published by: Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41669615 .

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A NEW VISION FOR A NEW AGE?

A New Social Vision for Canada? Perspectives on the Federal Discussion Paper on Social Policy Reform. Edited by Keith Banting and Ken Battle . Kingston and Ottawa: School of Policy Studies and the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, 1994

Remaking Canadian Social Policy: Social Security in the Late 1990s. Edited by Jane Pulkingham and Gordon Ternowetsky. Halifax: Fernwood, 1996

Progress without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance. By David F. Noble. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995

The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labour Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. By Jeremy Rijkin. New York: Putnam, 1995

Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. By Anthony Giddens. Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1994

Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. By Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994

Unmistakably, the familiar world of Canadians is crumbling. The with- drawal of the federal government from funding commitments and from national standards and the current provincial cutbacks are only part of the change. The rules of politics are shifting: both the Conservatives and the Liber- als were elected on the promise of jobs, only to follow a radically different course. The changes are spawning a few winners and many losers; among the latter are the users - and indeed the providers - of health care and social serv- ices.

Each of the three pairs of books listed above interprets the changes from a different perspective and at a different level. Perhaps the three viewpoints will help us grasp a picture of this time of profound flux.

The Social Security Review Two Canadian collections bring together a wide range of reflections on the ill- fated social policy review initiated in 1994 by the then Minister of Human Resource Development, Lloyd Axworthy.

Pulkingham and Ternowetsky edit papers from the 1995 Seventh Conference on Canadian Social Welfare Policy. In addition to the excellent overview pro- vided by the editors' introduction and a section exploring general aspects of the social security review, the collection offers sections on shifts in the Canadian labour market occasioned by globalization, on "workfare," and on the particu- lar implications of the changes for women. Strengths of the book include a con- textualization of the present issues in Canadian postwar history (the contributions of Battle 8c Torjman, Silver, Greene), comparisons with Australian recent

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126 Revue canadienne de service social, volume 13 (hiver)

history (Wiseman 8c Riches), and careful analyses of the impact of recent policy changes on working conditions (Stanford) , on older workers pushed out of the work force (Schellenberg), on single mothers and other "irregular" workers (Low, McFarland 8c Mullaly, Vosko).

Banting and Battle's book suffers by comparison. It contains papers from a conference at Queen's University held shortly after the appearance of the Axworthy Green Paper. Almost all the papers reveal a hint of the haste with which they were put together. The organizers were doubtless taking seriously Mr. Axworthy's call for a thorough discussion of the issues raised; it was not their fault that that discussion was rendered pointless by Mr. Martin's 1995 budget. However, my dissatisfaction goes further. The contributors are almost all economists, and this seems to have two implications. First, the contributions are mostly from a perspective that I would call managerial: either the author has decided that the primary policy goal is to "get our fiscal house in order" (as does Courchene) or the author writes from a utilitarian perspective, exempli- fied by Kesselman's concept of children as "human capital" in a contribution on the lack of policies to deal with child poverty. Only Torjman's chapter is unequivocally written from the perspective of people whose lives are being drastically rearranged by the changes. Secondly, even in those articles which are more critical of government (as, for instance, those of Osberg and Betcher- man), the author retains scientific detachment, pointing only to empirical defi- ciencies in the Green Paper's assumptions without any assessment of their historical or political context.

Technology and employment Several contributions to the first two books challenge the government's assumption that, with training, people will find jobs. This leaves open the question whether the federal government is any longer capable of creating enough jobs. The second pair of books (by Noble and Rifkin) examine the history of techno- logical change to show there will never again be enough jobs.

Rifkin 's bestseller offers a broad sweep through history since Watt invented the steam engine, piling up example after example to show that the logic of technical innovation has always been to displace workers. What makes the present so different is primarily the global scope of the innovations - because no sector is unaffected, displaced workers no longer have anywhere to go.

Noble's book is a collection of articles and papers from the 1980s. A historian of technology, he offers a trenchant analysis of ideological questions surround- ing technical change. His thesis, very close to Rifkin 's, is stark:

The touted beneficent circle of prosperity, which links investment to innovation, innovation to productivity, productivity to competitiveness, and competitiveness to social prosperity, is now ambiguous at each link. There is no longer any guarantee of social welfare along this route, given the mobility of capital and the global reach of multinational corporations, (p. 125)

Noble wants to dispel the "enchantment" of the idea of inevitable technologi- cal progress (p. 4). Technology becomes the "blind weight of the past" and the "perpetual promise of the future" once we lose sight of its present reality. Noble locates this reality on the "shop floor," by which he means the real reasons man-



Canadian Social Work Review, Volume 13 (Winter) 127

agers invest in innovations and the impact of these on the lives of those who work with the machines.

For most social policy analysts, the viewpoint of these books calls for a reassessment of recent history. Many of us tend to think of the years from 1945 to 1975 as a time of a noble social experiment, when humanist values such as equality and caring were in the ascendency. Others - perhaps more politically minded - think of them as a period when those who required the protection of social programs against the vagaries of the market were finally able to exact a stable political compromise from corporations and government. By contrast, Noble and Rifkin see those years as the very ambiguous last phase of the mechanical age, which began with Watt's steam engine. Because unions accepted the inevitability and beneficence of technical progress and because workers were assured social protection, managers were allowed to pursue without hindrance the logic of technical innovation. In the early 1980s, when managers no longer needed to compromise with labour, they precipitated the whole world into this new era, finally making manifest the long-standing goal of technical innovation - the elimination of human labour from the production process.

The future of politics This interpretation raises a question probed by several contributors to the Pulk- ingham and Ternowetsky book: where does a realistic political strategy take us in this new era? None falls into the trap (the fate of some "progressives") of idealizing the welfare programs we had and calling for struggle to regain them. As Ralph puts it, "Even the 'good old days' of the welfare state never gave us what we needed and wanted" (p. 295). She then notes inadequate, demeaning welfare as well as sexism and racism. Geller and Joel remark on the patriarchal form our welfare programs have taken (p. 304). Nonetheless, I find these chapters profoundly ambiguous. Ralph says that corporations are the real causes of our problems (p. 297). Geller and Joel argue that the key issues have been clouded by the political action of the corporate elites; they urge us to challenge globalization "precisely because it has robbed us of the ability to 'make socially and politically defined choices about the trade-offs between efficiency, leisure, social stability, environmental protection'

" (p. 305). Both point to the success

that corporate elites have had in dragging the red herring of the "debt wall" across Canadian political debates. I fully agree with the accuracy of all these statements; unfortunately they do not constitute a full enough diagnosis for us to build a prognosis. It almost sounds as if, were Canadians to see through the specious arguments of right-wing economists, they would be able to recapture the political ground they have lost. If Rifkin and Noble are even partially right, then that is a hopeless strategy. Having made the compromises which were the keystones of the full-employment, welfare-state era, working people lost ground irrevocably. Whatever political gains are now open to people must be made on some other terrain. That is the implication of the shift from one historical era to another.

Ralph points us in the right direction. She speaks of the need to reject "reac- tive, defensive campaigns which almost always fail" and to define "our own issues and visions" (p. 295). However, one can raise the question, who is "us"?




Both she and Geller and Joel use the vague phrase "popular sector," which seems to include everyone who is not exploiting others by taking profits. But both chapters refer to sexism, racism, and other axes of oppression which constitute serious, long-term divisions within the popular sector; no one can assume that the important issues in people's lives will unite them across those divides. Taking the "popular sector" as a category presupposes that corporations are the common enemy of everyone in it; to accept that is to make the notion of class a more important, more comprehensive category than race, class, age, or any other axis of inequality and oppression. My sense is that to rely on such an unexamined category is to run the risk of developing misplaced strategy.

Two contributions in the Pulkingham and Ternowetsky book break away from old models, those of Rioux and Bach and of Vaillan court. Vaillancourt also chal- lenges "progressives" to go "beyond the defensive" (p. 90). His prescription is to explore the potential of the "third sector," the non-profit and voluntary asso- ciations within the community. He calls for a new partnership between government and community-based agencies, so that responsibility is not simply downloaded onto already overworked women. Many English-speaking readers might write off Vaillancourťs distrust of the central government to his clearly articu- lated separatist stance. However, Rifkin - an American with no separatist thoughts at all - ends his book with exactly the same call and points to important decisions made recently by the Clinton administration to strengthen the third sector. My own view is that Vaillancourťs separatism (along with his persist- ent academic and community work and trenchant social analysis) has enabled him to break clear from the century-long bias of "progressives" who favour centralized solutions to social problems.

Writing from the perspective of people with disabilities, who under the Can- ada Assistance Plan got "worthy poor" status at the cost of exclusion from active society, Rioux and Bach explore some of the difficulties in turning to the community. They are especially sensitive to the demands of equality in the face of difference and call for the democratization of policy: that is, policy that respects differences. This does not mean simply the decentralization of decision making, since "communities have not secured inclusion and equality for people with disabilities in the past" and cannot be expected to do so now, when burdened with cutbacks (p. 324).

"Life politics" The third pair of books cuts into our problem at a very different level. The three contributors to Reflexive Modernization , each well known for his theoretical reflections on present-day social changes, are in remarkable agreement on their implications for political life. Besides their common book, I include here one by Giddens since he devotes much of it to an examination of the welfare state.

Giddens begins Beyond Left and Right with the remark that the present-day right has become radical - wanting to break with the past - and the left, in try- ing to hold on to the welfare state, has become conservative (p. 2). He dedicates several chapters to a critique of socialism and the welfare state. Among his many criticisms are that the welfare state has been of more benefit to the middle class than to the poor and that governments have often developed social programs



Canadian Social Work Review, Volume 13 (Winter) 129

more to foster loyalty to the state than to help people (p. 136). Both of these points are justified with respect to Canada.

Let us explore two of his criticisms. One is that welfare programs have been part of a larger project of "risk management," which can no longer be sus- tained (pp. 137-139). This argument draws upon Beck's earlier work. Beck has argued that since the 18th century it had been generally agreed that science would be humankind's main engine for progress. Perhaps the most powerful metaphors of this have been the public health measures discovered and imple- mented in the mid-19th century. Since then social problems have been referred to as "plagues," with the implication that social science will discover the secret cause and come up with the equivalent of a vaccine or sewer system to solve the problem. In Beck's language, science was the means whereby society could deal with "bads" as risks, learning to control and minimize them. Certainly political "progressives" adopted this view of "progress." The welfare state was initially cast in just this mould: the four major evils which humanity faced were con- strued as universal risks, with social programs as insurance pools in which everyone joined to protect one another.

However, in the past generation we have come to experience uncontrollable risks which arise not because of our lack of scientific knowledge, but as a direct result of scientific knowledge and technical intervention. Giddens calls them "manufactured risks." Beck's examples are universal risks of nuclear war or con- tamination and environmental depredation; I would add (given Noble's out- look on history) the unemployment caused by technical innovation. As a result, people no longer accept science as a base line from which we can all move for- ward; in fact one of the most important current political divides is between those who still think that the problems which confront us will admit of technical solutions and those who have lost all confidence in such an assumption. The state itself is drawn into this vortex of ambiguity: centralized solutions, so dear to "progressives," relied on a variety of scientific disciplines, none of which finds universal acceptance any more. Thus Beck talks of a shift from politics to "sub-politics," a move away from party politics to shape society "from below." Instead of politics being a rule-defined process for deciding about the distribu- tion of resources, it becomes a struggle over the rules themselves (pp. 16-34).

Giddens, in developing the same basic ideas, speaks rather of a shift from "emancipatory politics" to "life politics." His second important criticism of the welfare state is implicated in his discussions of this shift. He agrees with right- wing critics that welfare programs have bred dependency. This is not meant to be critical of recipients or to be simply negative, however, but to lead to a more positive vision. Emancipatory politics centred on state action and consisted in struggling for an equalization of life chances; life politics concerns life style. "It concerns disputes and struggles about how (as individuals and as collective humanity) we should live in a world where what used to be fixed either by nature or tradition is now subject to human decisions" (Beyond Left and Right , p. 15). It concerns identity as well as choice (p. 91).

Giddens first attained prominence as a social theorist by recasting basic socio- logical notions so that individual creativity and freedom emerged to balance the importance of social structures. Here he returns to that theme, arguing in Reflexive Modernization that we live in a posttraditional society. Now that neither




religion nor (more recently) science can provide fixed points for social orienta- tion, individuals are thrust on their own freedom and the self-help communities they create to decide on norms and rules.

Lash's contribution brings us down to earth, analyzing what are the stakes in this new game of politics. He argues that in this information age, an economy (such as the American or Canadian) which confines expertise to a small elite generates serious inequalities - a few winners and many losers, who experience exclusion and alienation (pp. 127-135). By contrast, the Japanese and Ger- mans - who have, more than anyone, brought about the new age - have optim- ized the flow of information to all workers through institutionalized trust relations. In Japan this trust is fostered by intra-corporation labour relations; in Ger- many by the apprentice system (pp. 121-126). This modifies the bleak picture presented by Rifkin and Noble, who focus on the North American inequalities, and points to strategic political goals.

Lash also argues that, if politics is primarily a trust-building exercise, it must rely on science as hermeneutic understanding of other people across cultural and ethical divides, rather than science as a method of attaining a kind of truth which enables prediction and control. This distinction is well known to social workers since the best of social work practice is based on science in the former sense, rather than the ability to categorize people as cases.

Conclusion The thread from these readings leads me to several observations. First, creative politics has ceased to be centred on the state; it seems futile to try to recreate the conditions whereby the state exacted concessions from multinational corporations. As well, creative politics is no longer driven by the goal of maximum economic growth or optimal competitiveness, nor by the vision of scientific management. Thirdly, people's creative energies are already in large measure focused on the health of their own communities; they should be clear that this is politics at its most creative. Finally, the goals of creative politics should be the uni- versalization of development both of individuals and communities, the optimal spread of information and expertise, and the fostering of institutionalized trust which also includes the respect of differences within the larger community. Patrick Kerans, Dalhousie University

ETHNICITY AND CULTURE IN CANADA

Ethnicity and Culture in Canada: The Research Landscape. Edited by J. W. Berry and J. A. Laponce. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994

TT HIS VOLUME is the outcome of conference papers presented as part of the report of a project entitled "State of the Art Review of Research on Canada's Multicultural Society." The review was commissioned by the Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 1991. It is an attempt to analyze systematically the ethnic diversity that has long been recognized as integral to the Canadian



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A NEW VISION FOR A NEW AGE?