Choice-Makers and Risk-Takers in Neo-Liberal Liquid Modernity: The Contradiction of the "Entrepreneurial" Sex Worker
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transformation from a welfare-based to a neo-liberal society, from a solid to liquid (post) modernity, has reconfigured the social category of the individual into one that is highly individualized, fragmented, commercialized and entangled in consumer culture. In this society individuals are conceptualized as being rational choice-makers and entrepreneurs – sifting through the multiple options available in order to appropriate the identity(ies)/role that will maximize benefits and minimize harms. Some identities, however, are still solid, unable to escape stigmatization and exclusion. Using the image of ‘the sex worker’, this paper aims to deconstruct this contradiction questioning why, under a socio-political system that values individuals who become entrepreneurs and take advantage of consumerism in a manner which maximizes financial benefits and minimizes risks, have sex workers not been redefined in this context? Rather, extending from Bauman’s (2007a) characterization of consumerism’s collateral casualties, they have come to be seen as ‘inconspicuous’ non-consumers.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".