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This paper argues that human security is intimately tied to social reproduction and the protection and enhancement of the capabilities that allow men and women to create and shape their own well-being over space and time. However, neo-liberal governance frameworks prioritize and privilege the security and rights of large capital over basic human security needs of the mass of humanity. This contradicts democratic determination of needs and social priorities. Indeed, notions of citizenship are being reconstituted along market-oriented lines, with a number of impacts on gender orders. The paper links these issues to two aspects of social reproduction the reproduction of the labor force and provisioning and caring needs in the context of Canada. Canada is used as an example not only because of its multi-level system of governance and its position in the global hierarchy of capitalist states, but also because Canada has consistently ranked at the top of the UN’s Human Development Index. If such transformations threaten human security in Canada, then logically, they are likely to be uncovered in other societies who have adopted neoliberal governance structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Power, Production and Social Reproduction, we began to explore a socialontology that would enable us to re-think basic categories and concepts of(global) political economy. In this paper we will try to take things a littlefurther by engaging in the debates between positivist, conventionalist (e.g.humanist and hermeneutic) and critical realist perspectives on ontology andepistemology. The aim is to be able to better make sense of ontologyunderstood broadly as an historical and human process involving human agency inthe creation of the institutions and structures of social life in a givenperiod, or more broadly, in shaping social reproduction. This approach willtherefore build on our earlier sketch of an approach to explanation in globalpolitical economy that incorporates the dialectic of structure and agency aswell as power/knowledge as a means to identify the moments not only of powerand production but also of social reproduction in the emerging world order. One way to do this is to further explore the distinction between work - whichin the sphere of production broadly mediates relations between social andnatural orders - and labour. The latter is a particular aspect of work whichin capitalism is appropriated and controlled in the capital-labour relation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]