Ethnostatistics and Sensemaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article combines ethnostatistics with Weick's sensemaking framework to explore how and why Canadian business schools and universities use comparative rankings and performance measures to signal to audiences about selected features and characteristics of their institutions. These quantitative performance-based strategies include seeking accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and the use of data produced by Maclean's annual university rankings and other performance benchmarks—to position and validate themselves in their academic fields. Specifically, the authors deconstruct the production, meaning, and rhetoric used by business schools and universities when they draw on accreditation and rankings in the processes of socially constructing a sense of academic standing that is used to project a plausible image to both external and internal audiences.
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 | 0.025 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.118 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".