Dealing with Toxicity in the Risk Society: The Case of the Hamilton, Ontario Plastics Recycling Fire*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Une perspective de la construction sociale sert de cadre a l'analyse des controverses sur la gestion des risques qui ont été provoquées à la suite d'un incendie majeur dans une usine de recyclage de matières plastiques à Hamilton, en Ontario. En mettant l'accent sur les processus de réclamation au cœur de l'interaction entre les représen‐tants du gouvernement, les acteurs environnementaux, les experts techniques et les résidants, il a été révélé qu'un accent trop limité aux questions d'ordre technique avait mené a l'exclusion des préoccupations fondées sur la rationalité culturelle ayant ainsi entraine un cadre d'interaction très litigieux divisant profondément. Les conséquences des conclusions empiriques de la thése de la société des risques ainsi que de la théorie sur la communication des risques sont explorées. A social construction perspective is applied in the analysis of the risk management controversies that arose in response to a large toxic fire that occurred at a Hamilton, Ontario plastics recycling facility. By focussing on the claimsmaking processes involved in the interaction of government officials, environmental movement actors, technical experts, and residents, it was found that an overly narrow focus on technical matters led to the exclusion of lay concerns based on cultural rationality, thereby resulting in a very contentious and divisive setting for interaction. Implications of the empirical findings for the risk society thesis and risk communication theory are explored.
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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".