Acknowledgments; Introduction -- Tracing Policy: Translation and Assemblage; Chapter 1 -- The New Zealand Model at Home and Abroad; Chapter 2 -- Producing Policy in Welfare Offices; Chapter 3 -- Reading Through Welfare Policy in Community Service Agencies; Chapter 4 -- Working with Policy in ""Real Life"": Welfare Mothers' Engagements; Conclusion -- Tracing Policy: Process/Power; Appendix I -- Key Moments in State Provisioning for Poor Mothers in Aotearoa/New Zealand; Appendix 2 -- Key Moments in State Provisioning for Poor Mothers in Canada and Alberta; References; Index
Summary
An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. Different actors, including not only policy élites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policy-translation and assemblage-Kingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy
