Janis Thiessen. Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Janis Thiessen. Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 264 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $27.95 sc. Stereotypical images of first generation immigrants often associated them with specific occupations and locations: Icelanders with fishing on Lake Winnipeg, Finns with forested northern Ontario's bush camps, Ukrainians and Germans with farming across the prairies, Italians with construction in southern Ontario, and wandering Jews peddling goods in various locations. More recently, some identify Sikhs as taxi drivers and Filipinos as garment workers and caregivers. Integration, intermarriage, assimilation, and secularization change both the reality and mainstream perceptions of ethnic immigrant groups as second, third and subsequent generations appear. Manufacturing Mennonites points to structural economic changes as a transformational development in the life and identity of that community's members. The book's roots are in a Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Gregory Kealey at the University of New Brunswick and it appears under the imprimatur of the long-running Canadian Social History Series he edits. As with many students of ethnicity and religion, Janis Thiessen was drawn to her subject by her own and her family's experiences: when, in her early twenties, she wore a T-shirt memorializing an anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike, her Mennonite employer's disparaging reaction shocked her: he took it as political statement; she thought she was merely expressing her fondness for the study of history. Well-written and thoroughly researched--dozens of interviews and more than a dozen manuscript collections consulted in addition to secondary sources Thiessen contextualizes her study in the literatures on North America's Mennonites and on business history, which according to her cannot be divorced from labour history. In addition to its lengthy bibliography, the reproduction of a few photographs gleaned from the Internet, and voluminous endnotes--one chapter has 188--the book offers some easy-to-grasp tables. Thiessen probes the connections between religious identity and the makeover of the Mennonite labour force occasioned by urbanization. She reminds us that ethnic and religious identities are fluid, in constant transformation, not fixed. Mennonites are not all cut from a single piece of sectarian cloth, and a plurality of identities and denominational differences has always persisted among them, no different in this respect from other Christians, Jews, and Muslims. As with the Christian social gospel, the Mennonite gospel preaches economic and social justice. Thiessen's study of a particular class of Mennonites since the Second World War deepens our understanding of a group long associated with largely self-contained pietistic rural colonies, which embraced pacifism and detached themselves from the secular world. Manitoba is the logical province for the study because although it has less than four percent of Canada's population, it has the country's largest number of Mennonites. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".