Associationalism Canadian Style: Flour Millers, Self-Regulation and the State, 1920-1935
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between the two world wars, the expansion of the state's regulatory capacity caused business-state relations in Canada to worsen rather than improve, as large manufacturers and those in government who advocated regulation viewed the utility of state power in different, and largely incompatible ways. The Canadian flour milling industry illustrates these persistent tensions. Confronted by overcapacity and seeking a method of coordination, the large millers organized an association in 1920. It established a complex system of regulations to fix prices. However, it initially failed completely to control either export or domestic prices and, when it finally seemed to have exerted greater control over domestic prices in 1930, the federal Combines Investigation Branch responded by forcing the suspension of price-fixing, just when market conditions reached a nadir. Numerous efforts to reorganize the industry through consolidations all failed. Late in 1933, the large millers sought state assistance to secure stability, but the solutions proposed would have imposed unwanted constraints on their power within the industry. Hence, the large millers did all they could to frustrate the development of regulation, continuing to advocate voluntary associationalism despite its past failures. The fundamental differences between the large millers and government over the function of regulation prevented the consensus necessary to make a regulatory solution work. This suggests that, whereas the regulation of community property succeeded because it accommodated interests and defrayed tensions, the process through which it acquired broad legitimacy did not extend to the regulation of private property. Indeed, without consensus that such regulation was desirable, attempts to create it produced conflict instead of accommodation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".