The New Social “isms”: Individualization and Social Policy Reform in Canada

Abstract

This chapter focuses on what I have termed the “new social-isms,” and the ways in which these popular conceptual frames embed neoliberal political rationalities in social policy reform and citizenship practices in Canada. This term flags the many and different appeals to the “social” that have been interwoven into political rhetoric, social policy thinking, and policy performances in the past decade, among them social cohesion, social exclusion/inclusion, social capital, social care, social economy, and social investment. These concepts, and the social policy prescriptions that they evoke, contrast markedly with deployments of the social in the postwar model of social governance, such as social security, social justice, social citizenship, social solidarity, social rights, and social welfare. Although applications of the new social-isms vary widely both across national settings and in academic debates, the prominence afforded to these terms in contemporary social policy reform is often taken as evidence of a “social turn” in neoliberal governing practices, if not as a beacon of a new and still unfolding “late” or “post” neoliberal era. This social turn is represented as a qualitative departure from the familiar modalities of the postwar welfare state and neoliberal fundamentalism, as well as an exercise in pragmatism and reflexivity that responds to the “new social risks” of the contemporary era. It purportedly is shaping a “third way” or hybrid liberal state form that maneuvers through the uncharted waters of postindustrialism and globalization, while, at the same time, avoiding the perils of either “too much state” or “too much market” (Giddens 1998).