Telling Tales: Living the Effects of Public Policy.

Telling Tales: Living the Effects of Public Policy By Sheila Neysmith, Kate Bezanson, Anne O'Connell. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2005, 323 pp.

Telling Tales documents the effects of social policy on people's daily lives. Based on interviews with 40 households, this research reveals the impact of economic restructuring on households from 1997 to 2000 in the Canadian province of Ontario. The authors examine the local effects of neo-liberal globalization in the province at a time when a politically conservative government engineered and implemented a huge number of policy changes over a short period of time. The resulting social and economic changes were significant in scope. These narratives tell the tale of the changing relationship between citizens and the state; they reveal the forced exclusion of disadvantaged members of society from citizenship rights through key themes of income security, surveillance, violence, exclusions, and the centrality of paid employment.

This study advances social policy analysis and research in three ways. First, the authors break with traditional analytic approaches that either examine the dynamics and results of a particular policy program, or examine how and why a particular policy in a particular context becomes established. Instead, this study investigates "how policies play out in lives of citizens from perspective of those who experience them-those for whom, ostensibly, they are designed" (p.14). Bringing people's lives to the forefront of research entails recognizing that people have obligations as individuals, work ers, parents, volunteers and citizens, as well as members of households, and diverse communities. This research strategy, where participants tell their own stories in four interviews over three years, enabled the researchers to understand the "multiple, cumulative and compounding" impacts of policies in people's lives.

The body of the book is organized around themes that emerged from people's narratives rather than around specific policies. For example, in the chapter "Compounding Effects of Policy Change," a few cases show how cutbacks and restructuring in the health care sector impacted women not only as health care workers, but also as patients and primary caregivers. In the chapter "Outcomes of Income Insecurity," policies that created affordable housing and regulated labour markets were inextricably bound in the lives of people in non-standard jobs, many of whom cope with income insecurity by relying on family for housing and in-kind contributions, or multiple sources of income.

The second way this study is innovative is the selection of the household as the unit of analysis. The authors define household broadly as: "one or more people sharing living space on a regular basis where adult members share some or all resources and some degree of commitment to the relationship" (p.16). The authors argue that this understanding of household more accurately captures people's relationships that include multigenerational, two-parent, single parent, close friends, extended kin, and same-sex arrangements. Foregrounding people's relationships, and considering ways that relationships are helpful or burdensome, provides insight about the actual impact of policy on people's daily lives. In particular, examples from the chapter "Myth of Community, Family and Friends" demonstrate the costs and limits of relying on family and friends to make up for declining social and health care services. While in some cases, sharing resources is mutually beneficial for family members, in other cases, people's relationships are strained as a result. For one sole-support mother, policies that oblige her to seek resources from a "deadbeat dad" place her at increased risk of violence that she experienced previously in that relationship. The question underlying the analysis of households is what relationships are being assumed, how are relationships been constructed by policies, and most critically, to whose benefit is it that relationships are constructed in the way they are'?

The third aspect of the study that merits comment is the authors' consideration of social location in their theoretical framework, methodology and analysis. Social location is defined by "the intersectionality of dimensions of privilege and oppression" (p.8). In order to determine the differential effects of social policy on individuals and their households, households were selected for diversity in terms of income level and sources, type of household, geographic location, as well as race, language, sexual orientation, Aboriginal status and ability. The researchers sought maximum diversity so that they could connect the concerns of different groups across different policies but also acknowledge how social location influences people's experience and the way they make sense of their lives. For example, while many participants expressed concern about education policies, for one Aboriginal family, these concerns are also shaped by an experience of racism, which alerted them to harmful depictions and/or invisibility of Aboriginal people from school curriculum (p.201). In addition, considering social location meant including privileged as well as disadvantaged households in the study.

From the introduction, through to the final chapter on methodology, the book is full of new interpretations of known facts. Readers gain insight on how policies promote risky behaviours and disempowerment of groups of people through the creation of categories (like disabled, employable, or "at risk" youth), produce exclusion from social programs and systems, and construct social problems as private matters (for example, the poverty of single mothers as failed relationships). The data challenges readers to re-evaluate popular discourses that hide a reality where jobs do not necessarily guarantee income security, where education and training does not guarantee "good jobs," and where care work continues to be devalued over paid employment.

Telling Tales is meant to appeal to a wide audience of social policy professionals, academics and students. While the issues brought up in the study are interconnected, and the analysis is suitably complex, the sheer breadth of themes raised can be overwhelming for readers. But this is part of the argument; that these are complex issues that require a new and complex understanding of social policy. Still, there is the practical matter of creating social and economic policies to affect social conditions of equity, and inclusion in a political climate where neo-liberal agendas define social services cutbacks, de-regulation and privatization as the only viable option. Telling Tales contributes to this considerable challenge by providing a solid groundwork from which to develop social policies that address the actualities of people's lives.