An Update on Affirmative Businesses or Social Firms for People With Mental Illness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social firms, or "affirmative businesses" as they are known in North America, are businesses created to employ people with disabilities and to provide a needed product or service. This Open Forum offers an overview of the development and status of social firms. The model was developed in Italy in the 1970s for people with psychiatric disabilities and has gained prominence in Europe. Principles include that over a third of employees are people with a disability or labor market disadvantage, every worker is paid a fair-market wage, and the business operates without subsidy. Independent of European influence, affirmative businesses also have developed in Canada, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. The success of individual social firms is enhanced by locating the right market niche, selecting labor-intensive products, having a public orientation for the business, and having links with treatment services. The growth of the social firm movement is aided by legislation that supports the businesses, policies that favor employment of people with disabilities, and support entities that facilitate technology transfer. Social firms can empower individual employees, foster a sense of community in the workplace, and enhance worker commitment through the organization's social mission.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.006 |
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".