Building the case for the study of the middle class: shifting our gaze from margins to centre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues for the study of the middle class in Canada, an overlooked dimension of the scholarly works and public debates on income polarisation. The article includes four sections: (i) original empirical research, sharing snapshots into the status of Canada's middle class emphasising its changing economic performance; (ii) an exploration of the sociological and political functions of the middle class; (iii) an articulation of the avenues through which the middle class can be operationalised for study; and (iv) the implications of a deteriorating middle class, which suggests both a deepening of destructive effects of neo‐liberalism yet also highlights opportunities for resistance. Recommendations for social movements are highlighted. While the context of this article is the Canadian experience, the political consequences for this study spread beyond its borders, particularly in the north where the benefits of neo‐liberalism are accruing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.141 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".