<p>This study investigates the responses of the labour movement, social policy advocacy organizations, and feminists to the downsizing and restructuring of the welfare state in Canada. Of interest in this research is whether these constituencies are in the initial stages of 're-conceptualizing' social welfare, given that the increasing degree of economic globalization and the rightward shift in political thinking in recent years have created a need for 'paradigm shift' in approaches to social policy among equality-seeking social movements.</p> <p>It is discovered that these three social movements (labour, social policy advocates, and feminists) are at varying stages in imagining and working to achieve a progressive alternative to the postwar welfare state. Some elements of the labour movement have clearly identified the economic and political roots of growing social inequality. Some elements of the social policy advocacy community are promoting comprehensive alternative economic and social policies to the ones currently dominating political discourse. The women's movement, as represented by the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, appears to be the furthest ahead in developing a theoretically grounded critique of neoconservative I neo-liberal social welfare restructuring, and in posing progressive alternatives to it.</p> <p>Theoretical issues which arise in regard to rethinking social welfare and reformulating social policy are discussed. There is also reference made to the strategic challenges which confront social movements within Canada and internationally, in their efforts to use social policy as a means of achieving greater social equality and an environmentally sustainable set of economic and political arrangements.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is empirically grounded in New Zealand's restructuring of unemployment and taxation policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Theoretically it is inspired by a post-Marxist discourse analytical approach that focuses on discourses as political strategies. This approach has made it possible, through an analysis of changing citizenship discourses, to understand how the neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime proceeded via debate and struggle over unemployment and taxation policy. Debates over unemployment and taxation in New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s reconfigured the targets of policy and re-ordered social antagonism, establishing a neoliberal citizenship regime and centring political problematic. This construction of a neoliberal citizenship regime involved re-specifying the targets of public policy as consumers and taxpayers. In exploring the hegemonic discourse strategies of the Fourth Labour Government and the subsequent National-led governments of the 1990s, this thesis traces the process of reconfiguring citizen subjectivity initially as 'social consumers' and participants in a coalition of minorities, and subsequently as universal taxpayers in antagonistic relation to unemployed beneficiaries. These changes are related back to key discursive events in New Zealand's recent social policy history as well as to shifts in the discourses of politicians that address the nature of the public interest and the targets of social policy. I argue that this neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime was the outcome of the hegemonic articulatory discourse strategies of governing parties in the 1980s and 1990s. Struggles between government administrations and citizen-based social movement groups were articulated to the neoliberal project. I also argue that in the late 1990s, discursive struggle between the dominant parties to define themselves in difference from each other reveals both the 'de'contestation of a set of neoliberal policy prescriptions, underscoring the neoliberal political problematic, and the privileging of a contributing taxpayer identity as the source of political legitimacy. This study shows that the dynamics of discursive struggle matter and demonstrates how the outcomes of discursive struggle direct policy change. In particular, it establishes how neoliberal discourse strategies evolved from political discourses in competition with other discourses to become the hegemonic political problematic underscoring institutional practice and policy development.