No abstract

This study compares the reform of public social provision in the United States, Canada, and Mexico from 1996 to 2006. It highlights important parallels among the three countries in terms of policy design, discourses that frame each policy, and the ways social citizenship has become reconfigured. We argue that in all three cases, poor women/mothers are being regulated, monitored, and held accountable through surveillance and sanctions, reinforcing how social rights have morphed into social responsibilities and obligations. The objective is to shift welfare from “passive” support to “active” integration into the market, reinforcing a worker‐citizen model within precarious labor markets. The Canadian model shares elements with the U.S. model in its emphasis on welfare‐to‐work policies and integrating single mothers with young children into the workforce. The Mexican model integrates mothers as consumers into the market while investing in their children as future worker‐citizens. The article concludes by broadening the discussion from country‐specific analysis to speculating about the possibility of integrating workers within a North American market.

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to examine and describe the portrayal of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in mass print media magazines. Design: The sample included all 37 articles found in magazines with circulation rates of greater than 1 million published in the United States and Canada from 1980 to 2005. The analysis was quantitative and qualitative and included investigation of both manifest and latent magazine story messages. Results: Manifest analysis noted that CAM was largely represented as a treatment for a patient with a medically diagnosed illness or specific symptoms. Discussions used biomedical terms such as patient rather than consumer and disease rather than wellness. Latent analysis revealed three themes: (1) CAMs were described as good but not good enough; (2) individualism and consumerism were venerated; and (3) questions of costs were raised in the context of confusion and ambivalence.