Rianne Mahon
Biographic Data
| ID | 301411 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rianne Mahon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rianne |
| FAMILY NAME | Mahon |
| SIGNATURE | MAHON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carleton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9570-0883 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 360 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Reflections on the past and future of Global Social Policy
The Care Economy al América Latina: A Multi-scalar Feminist Project
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) created an opening to put the care economy on the global agenda, but the idea found particularly fertile ground in Latin America and the Caribbean well before COVID. This article examines the way the idea and practice of a care economy has been developed by feminists in the region. It looks at the role played by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and the triennial Regional Conferences o…
The Never-Ending Story: The Struggle for Universal Child Care Policy in the 1970s
Special Section on The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence
Care is so ubiquitous that it easily becomes invisible. As an acute shock that suddenly disrupted multiple dimensions of life, COVID-19 made visible the importance of care, the extent to which economies rely on women’s unpaid and underpaid labor, and the terrible human and economic costs associated with its inadequate and unequal organization. At the same time, the pandemic has provided an opportunity to envision—and to fight for—a better world i…
Redressing harms to migrant domestic workers: Global and regional spaces
This article analyses spaces for seeking redress for the harms experienced by migrant care workers and those left behind, working with the concept of depletion through social reproduction. While ‘global care chains’ also highlights the tolls exacted, depletion through social reproduction adds the important quasi-legal concept of ‘harm’, explicitly inviting reflection on spaces for redress and claims-making. Nation-states clearly constitute import…
Broadening the social investment agenda: The OECD, the World Bank and inclusive growth
Towards the close of the 20th century, the idea of social investment gained purchase as a way to legitimise social policy as a productive contribution. For those in the North, social investment provided a new rationale to counter neoliberal attacks on the welfare state, while in the South, the idea caught on in the form of conditional cash transfers. The World Bank and Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) played key roles …
Through a fractured gaze: The OECD, the World Bank and transnational care chains
Transnational care chains can be seen as a wicked problem, i.e. one that requires coordination across a range of jurisdictions. Yet international organizations, like other bureaucracies, factor problems. While this is designed to make issues more manageable, it can also inhibit the organization's ability to grasp, and therefore to deal adequately with, wicked problems. This article examines the way policy research conducted in different parts of …
Social Policy Change: Work–family Tensions in Sweden, Australia and Canada
The rise of the adult worker family norm across countries of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development has created challenges for reconciling work and family life as the unpaid work of the female caregiver can no longer be assumed. The article compares childcare arrangements and maternity/parental leave programmes in Sweden, Australia and Canada that attempt to address these challenges. Sweden was an early innovator, establishing…
After '08: Social Policy and the Global Financial Crisis
The 2007-08 financial crisis marked a turning point for social policy. World leaders were forced to take a position: Should they entrench neo-liberal policies in response to the crisis? Or should they implement alternative measures to challenge economics as usual? After ’08 examines how global institutions, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and International Labour Organization, as well as nation states around the world respond…
GSP Editors’ Farewell
In conversation with Ron Gass: The OECD and the crisis of progress
Articulating a Feminist Agenda Within the OECD: The Working Party on the Role of Women in the Economy: Table A1
Gender equality has become an established part of the global agenda, spawning a rich body of literature on transnational women's organising and the role played by international organisations, especially the United Nations. For the most part, however, the contribution of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation (OECD) has been ignored. Gender equality has, however, long been on the OECD's agenda, largely because of the role played by the Working …
Analysing Social Policy Concepts and Language: Comparative and transnational perspectives
Social policy scholars and practitioners work with concepts such as "welfare state" and "social security" but where do these concepts come from and how has their meaning changed over time? Which are the dominant social policy concepts and how are they contested? What characterises social policy language in specific countries and regions of the world and how do social concepts travel between countries? Addressing such questions in a systematic man…
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, C…
Social Investment According to the OECD/Delsa: A Discourse in the Making
It is important to draw critical attention to the broad policy perspectives that travel across the globe and operate at multiple scales. Social Investment is clearly one such set of ideas that has assumed increasing prominence over the last two decades. Like most such rapidly diffusing ideas, however, it admits of quite different interpretations. In this article I examine the most recent iterations of the Directorate for Employment, Labour and So…
Federalism and the "New Politics" of Welfare Development: Childcare and Parental Leave in Australia and Canada
How does federal state architecture affect the design of welfare? We explore the development of childcare and parental leave in Canada and Australia to address this question. Both countries are considered liberal welfare regimes, but their federal institutions operate in quite different ways, providing an opportunity for comparative analysis. We consider the ways in which federal institutions have affected mobilization around childcare and parent…
Introduction: The World Bank’s new approach to gender equality
Convergent care regimes? Childcare arrangements in Australia, Canada, Finland and Sweden
This article is about the transnational movement of policy discourses on childcare. It considers whether the spread of neoliberal ideas with their emphasis on marketisation, on the one hand, and a social investment discourse on the other, are leading to convergence in childcare arrangements in Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden) and liberal Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia and Canada). We find points of convergence around both themes at the lev…
Feminist Ethics and Social Policy: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care
As national borders become more permeable, women are increasingly on the move, travelling from poor to rich countries to take up jobs as care workers. The struggle to maintain a healthy work/care balance in Western countries is creating a care deficit in the developing world. Feminist Ethics and Social Policy links ethics to the social politics of care by revealing the implications of the feminization of migrant labour and the shortcomings of soc…
Remise en cause des paramètres du post-fordisme au Canada et en Ontario
L’intérêt que la gauche porte à la réorganisation du travail et aux nouvelles pratiques de gestion est, en grande partie, liée au potentiel que celles-ci renferment pour l’avancement de la démocratie industrielle. Plus largement, le type de restructuration économique associée à de tels changements — tantôt appelée « à haute valeur ajoutée » tantôt « post-fordiste » — pourrait signifier la revitalisation des économies à hauts salaires, comme celle…
The Jobs Strategy: From neo- to inclusive liberalism
This paper focuses on the OECD's 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 Union's 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 …
State Structures and The Politics of Child Care
New and reconfigured structures of policymaking and governance present fresh challenges to gender equality seekers, especially in federal systems. In a world in which policy functions are increasingly being “uploaded” to international or supranational levels, “downloaded” to meso-level units, or “offloaded” to civil society and private enterprises (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003), the links among institutional design, policy activism, and pol…
After Neo-Liberalism: The OECD, the World Bank and the Child
Although the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank are often (rightly) associated with the diffusion of ideas and practices underpinning neo-liberal globalization, a closer examination of their policy discourses over the last decade suggests that they have clearly gone beyond the brute neo-liberal prescription of welfare cuts and structural adjustment. This shift is particularly evident in their advocacy…
Introduction: Transnationality and Gender: Power, Policy, and Otherness
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2010
Anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City
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…
Convergent care regimes? Childcare arrangements in Australia, Canada, Finland and Sweden
This article is about the transnational movement of policy discourses on childcare. It considers whether the spread of neoliberal ideas with their emphasis on marketisation, on the one hand, and a social investment discourse on the other, are leading to convergence in childcare arrangements in Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden) and liberal Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia and Canada). We find points of convergence around both themes at the lev…
Child Care: "Toward What Kind of "Social Europe
Child care is central to contemporary welfare state redesign. The emergence of the dual-earner family challenges states to take on new responsibilities as families can no longer provide full-time care, nor can they afford to rely exclusively on markets. There are, however, different ways of addressing the care deficit, and each holds different implications for equality. This article examines the three dominant alternatives being pursued in Wester…
After Neo-Liberalism: The OECD, the World Bank and the Child
Although the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank are often (rightly) associated with the diffusion of ideas and practices underpinning neo-liberal globalization, a closer examination of their policy discourses over the last decade suggests that they have clearly gone beyond the brute neo-liberal prescription of welfare cuts and structural adjustment. This shift is particularly evident in their advocacy…
Anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City
Child Care in Canada and Sweden: Policy and Politics
Journal Article Child Care in Canada and Sweden: Policy and Politics Get access RIANNE MAHON RIANNE MAHON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 4, Issue 3, Fall 1997, Pages 382–418, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/4.3.382 Published: 01 October 1997
Of scalar hierarchies and welfare redesign: Child care in three Canadian cities
Scalar theory has recently come under attack for its emphasis on hierarchy. Yet the notion of scalar hierarchies cannot be abandoned if we want to understand actually‐existing social relations and the governance structures in which they are enmeshed. The conception of hierarchy employed by political economists is also more complex than that suggested by the ‘Russian dolls’ metaphor. A multiplicity of diversely structured, overlapping interscalar …
Rescaling Social Reproduction: Childcare in Toronto/Canada and Stockholm/Sweden
The last two decades have witnessed the restructuring and rescaling of the welfare regimes consolidated in the postwar era. More is involved, however, than rollbacks justified by neoliberal globalization and engineered via downloading to subnational scales. States are also being pushed to assume new responsibilities for social reproduction as a result of the 'care crisis' stemming from the death of the male breadwinner/female caregiver family for…
Federalism and the "New Politics" of Welfare Development: Childcare and Parental Leave in Australia and Canada
How does federal state architecture affect the design of welfare? We explore the development of childcare and parental leave in Canada and Australia to address this question. Both countries are considered liberal welfare regimes, but their federal institutions operate in quite different ways, providing an opportunity for comparative analysis. We consider the ways in which federal institutions have affected mobilization around childcare and parent…
The OECD's Discourse on the Reconciliation of Work and Family Life
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) can be considered a pioneer of soft forms of transnational governance. For some it has used its `soft powers' to contribute to the construction of a neoliberal world order, however Neoliberal solutions are not the only ones it has to offer, especially in the area of social policy. What accounts for the ability of one unit (the Directorate on Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, D…
The Care Economy al América Latina: A Multi-scalar Feminist Project
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) created an opening to put the care economy on the global agenda, but the idea found particularly fertile ground in Latin America and the Caribbean well before COVID. This article examines the way the idea and practice of a care economy has been developed by feminists in the region. It looks at the role played by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and the triennial Regional Conferences o…
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 Canada's 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 t…
One-Dimensional Marxism
Varieties of Liberalism: Canadian Social Policy from the ‘Golden Age’ to the Present
The dominant welfare regimes approach, like the historical‐institutionalism on which it draws, predicts path‐dependent responses to contemporary challenges. According to this, Canada's social policy regime clearly belongs to the (mainly Anglo‐American) ‘liberal’ family, where markets and families retain a key role, supplemented by modest state supports. Yet, as some have recognized, there are important differences among liberal regimes and within…
Introduction: Gender and the Politics of Scale
Much of contemporary social science betrays its roots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an era when the national state form, pioneered in Europe, spread across the globe, becoming the normal way of organizing social and political life. The centrality of the national scale thus operates as an assumption deeply embedded in social science theory and analysis. This also applies to much of the work on gender and social politics, not the least…
Nafta, the Redesign, and 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 integr…
Broadening the social investment agenda: The OECD, the World Bank and inclusive growth
Towards the close of the 20th century, the idea of social investment gained purchase as a way to legitimise social policy as a productive contribution. For those in the North, social investment provided a new rationale to counter neoliberal attacks on the welfare state, while in the South, the idea caught on in the form of conditional cash transfers. The World Bank and Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) played key roles …
Social Policy Change: Work–family Tensions in Sweden, Australia and Canada
The rise of the adult worker family norm across countries of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development has created challenges for reconciling work and family life as the unpaid work of the female caregiver can no longer be assumed. The article compares childcare arrangements and maternity/parental leave programmes in Sweden, Australia and Canada that attempt to address these challenges. Sweden was an early innovator, establishing…
The Jobs Strategy: From neo- to inclusive liberalism
This paper focuses on the OECD's 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 Union's 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 …
Gender and State in Post-communist Societies: Introduction
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2007
Swedish Social Democracy: Death of a Model
The interest in new social democracy arises in a context where the old model, forged in the first half of the twentieth century and elaborated in the golden postwar decades, no longer seems viable. Globalization, post-industrialism and the post-patriarchal family are understood substantially to have changed the game
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 wi…
Articulating a Feminist Agenda Within the OECD: The Working Party on the Role of Women in the Economy: Table A1
Gender equality has become an established part of the global agenda, spawning a rich body of literature on transnational women's organising and the role played by international organisations, especially the United Nations. For the most part, however, the contribution of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation (OECD) has been ignored. Gender equality has, however, long been on the OECD's agenda, largely because of the role played by the Working …
State Structures and The Politics of Child Care
New and reconfigured structures of policymaking and governance present fresh challenges to gender equality seekers, especially in federal systems. In a world in which policy functions are increasingly being “uploaded” to international or supranational levels, “downloaded” to meso-level units, or “offloaded” to civil society and private enterprises (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003), the links among institutional design, policy activism, and pol…
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, C…
The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism
Canadian Labour in the Battle of the Eighties
clarion call for total mobilisation with which the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) concluded The Battle of the Eighties: Trade Union Rights vs Corporate Power, captures the challenge facing Canadian labour. economic crisis which began in the seventies has led to new corporate and state initiatives to promote restructuring which poses a threat to previous gains made by Canadian workers: free collective bargaining, social security and macro-economic…
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 wi…
One-Dimensional Marxism
The Politics of Industrial Restructuring: Canadian Textiles
New Developments in Comparative Political Economy
The Waffle and Canadian Political Economy
The rediscovery of Canadian political economy - a creative fusion of Latin American dependency theory, European marxism and our own home-grown Innisian political economy, developed to explore the reasons for Canada's position as a rich but underdeveloped country - cannot be understood without reference to the Waffle
From "Bringing" to "Putting: The State in Late Twentieth-Century Social Theory
Rianne Mahon, From "Bringing" to "Putting": The State in Late Twentieth-Century Social Theory, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 119-144
Representing Solidarity: Class, Gender and the Crisis in Social-Democratic Sweden
The 1991 Swedish election produced the victory of a coalition of four bourgeois parties dedicated to bringing about a ‘system shift’. Their preparedness to break with the Swedish social-democratic model stands in marked contrast to the bourgeois governments of 1976–82. The change can be understood only in relation
Wage-Earners and/or Co-Workers? Contested Identities
When it came to the accumulation of working-class powera resources in the Fordist era, the Swedish labour movement was rightly considered the paradigm exemplar. With the adoption of its new strategy, 'solidaristic work for solidaristic wages', Swedish labour also seemed to have developed its own preferred vision of a post-Fordist future. Whether it will actually have the strength required to shape the terms of restructuring, however, is very much…
The Challenge of Restructuring: North American Labor Movements Respond
The Challenge of Restructuring: North American Labor Movements Respond
The Challenge of Restructuring: North American Labor Movements Respond
Child Care in Canada and Sweden: Policy and Politics
Journal Article Child Care in Canada and Sweden: Policy and Politics Get access RIANNE MAHON RIANNE MAHON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 4, Issue 3, Fall 1997, Pages 382–418, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/4.3.382 Published: 01 October 1997
Gender, Equality, and Welfare States
The Brave New World of European Labor: European Trade Unions at the Millennium
The brave new world of European labor: European trade unions at the millennium
"European trade unions played a central role in building a "European model of society"--Negotiated labor-management relations, high labor standards, generous welfare states, and collective political representation - which reached its pinnacle in the earlier post-World War II era. More recently, this European "model" and the unions place in it have been challenged by lower growth, rising unemployment, accelerated European integration, and neo-libe…
The Never-Ending Story: The Struggle for Universal Child Care Policy in the 1970s
This article tells the first part of the still unfinished story of the struggle for universal child care in Canada. The story is never-ending because, on the one hand, there is a stubborn and persistent need for good-quality child care linked to the high labour-force participation rate of mothers. This need, moreover, has been articulated by a growing chorus of actors. On the other hand, certain barriers continue to block the development of an ac…
Swedish Social Democracy: Death of a Model
The interest in new social democracy arises in a context where the old model, forged in the first half of the twentieth century and elaborated in the golden postwar decades, no longer seems viable. Globalization, post-industrialism and the post-patriarchal family are understood substantially to have changed the game
Theorizing Welfare Regimes: Toward a Dialogue
Journal Article Theorizing Welfare Regimes: Toward a Dialogue? Get access RIANNE MAHON RIANNE MAHON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 8, Issue 1, Spring 2001, Pages 24–35, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/8.1.24 Published: 01 March 2001
Child Care: "Toward What Kind of "Social Europe
Child care is central to contemporary welfare state redesign. The emergence of the dual-earner family challenges states to take on new responsibilities as families can no longer provide full-time care, nor can they afford to rely exclusively on markets. There are, however, different ways of addressing the care deficit, and each holds different implications for equality. This article examines the three dominant alternatives being pursued in Wester…
Bourdieu in Canada: An Invitation for Debate
On 25 July 2002 a group of squatters, led by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), occupied an empty apartment building on King Street West in Toronto's Parkdale neighborhood. The date coincided with World Youth Day, a global mega-festival for young Catholics. The highlights of the one-week event were several pilgrimage spectacles, including a vigil and a mass in which Pope John Paul II participated. While the streets of Toronto had the w…
D'un modèle paradigmatique à une coquille vide: Les syndicats suédois à la fin du vingtième siècle
Cette analyse examine les défis auxquels les syndicats suédois ont été confrontés, en plus d'évaluer leur capacité à les relever.La première partie du texte passe brièvement en revue la théorie des ressources de pouvoir telle qu'elle s'applique au cassuédois*. On tente d'y démontrer que si le mouvement syndical suédois est en effet exemplaire, il est impossible de considérerses ressources comme permanentes ou absolues. De plus, il a fait l'objet …
Perspectives of Equality: Work, Women, and Family in the Nordic Countries and EU
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
Political science (55 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Economics (38 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (38 works) · Law (31 works) · Politics (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Political economy (21 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (15 works) · Economic growth (12 works)