A Labour Force for the Consumer Century: Commodification in Canada's Largest Department Stores, 1890 to 1940
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1890 and 1940 Canada’s three largest department stores — Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and the Hudson’s Bay Company — developed a multifacted system of employee commodification. Not only did they encourage their employees to become avid consumers, so did they market their employees’ activities, interests, and bodies. They undertook these commodifying gestures in an attempt to extract value from their workforces. Investigating the rise and operation of commodification at these major retailers, this paper offers new insights into corporate management systems, demonstrates that commodification had negative consequences for employees, and provides fresh perspectives on 20th-century consumer capitalism. Resume Entre 1890 et 1940, les trois magasins les plus grands du Canada — Eaton’s, Simpson’s, et la Baie — ont elabore un systeme polyvalent de reification des employes. Ils avaient non seulement encourage leurs employes a devenir des consommateurs passionnes, mais aussi commercialise leurs activites, interets et meme leurs corps. Ils avaient entrepris ces gestes de reification dans l’intention d’extraire davantage de profits de leur main-d’œuvre. En etudiant l’emergence et le fonctionnement de cette nouvelle methode de gestion, cet article offre de nouvelles introspections dans l’administration des entreprises. Il demontre que la reification avait des consequences negatives sur les employes et donne de nouvelles perspectives sur le capitalisme de consommation du 20e siecle.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
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".