Spaces of Resistance or Acquiescence? Learning from Media Discourses on the Role of Voluntarism in Ageing Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the extent to which a correspondence exists between academic theories and public perceptions concerning the role of volunteers and voluntary organizations in ageing communities. Drawing on local print media as a key source of information on public discourse, and with reference to an existing theorization of voluntarism, we analyze daily newspaper coverage of voluntary sector involvement in community care, long-term care, and health system restructuring in a mid-size Canadian city in the 2000s. The findings reveal how the link between voluntarism and ageing in place is portrayed in public discourse, how this portrayal fits with the prevailing academic conceptions of voluntarism as a ‘space of resistance’, and how the local print media helps shape discourse on voluntarism in ageing communities. The evident risk within the academic literature of overtheorizing voluntarism beyond its documented significance and the tendencies within public discourse to romanticize volunteers and voluntary organizations are problematized, and the implications for developing informed policy in ageing communities are discussed.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".