Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article shows that the simultaneous management of three different social roles – knowledge producer, representative of a government, and bureaucrat – defines the everyday work and practice of contemporary diplomats posted at embassies. This argument rests on an analysis of information gathering in Western embassies before, during and after the eighteen days of the revolt that ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. I first identify various practices influencing diplomatic knowledge and prompting the production of particular interpretations of the revolt in Egypt. I then analyze how actors manage multiple positions and dispositions within overlapping social fields. This point illustrates what practice theorists mean when they assert that agents are always speaking from a position. Overall, the article unravels what being a diplomat posted abroad actually consists of in practice, complementing existing studies on the diplomatic mode of knowledge production. I provide insights on the interactions between diplomats and non-state actors and show that diplomats’ social skills and analytic competence constantly require and support each other.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".