Government Policy and Postsecondary Education in Alberta: A ‘Field Theory’ Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the landscape of postsecondary education in Alberta continues to expand and diversify, there seems to be very little written about the organization of postsecondary education in the province over the past 15 to 20 years (Wimmer & Schmaus, 2010). This paper provides an analysis of postsecondary education in Alberta over the past 15 to 20 years using social theory, specifically “thinking tools” (Grenfell & James, 2004) provided in Bourdieu’s Field Theory to reveal power struggles in the system. Government policies that drive postsecondary institutions to struggle for position in market-like conditions while tightly controlling the parameters of that market are explored. We discuss the role government policy plays in the reproduction of power structures and their distribution of capital in the province of Alberta. Alors que l’éducation postsecondaire en Alberta continue à s’étendre et à se diversifier, on a très peu écrit sur son organisation dans les 15 ou 20 dernières années (Wimmer & Schmaus, 2010). Cet article analyse l’éducation postsecondaire en Alberta dans les 15 ou 20 dernières années par le biais de la théorie sociale, notamment les outils de pensée (Grenfell & James, 2004) de la théorie des champs de Bourdieu, de sorte à dévoiler les luttes pour le pouvoir au sein du système. Nous nous penchons sur les politiques gouvernementales qui poussent les établissements postsecondaires à se battre pour leur position dans des conditions qui ressemblent à celles du marché tout en contrôlant strictement les paramètres de ce marché. Nous discutons le rôle des politiques gouvernementales dans la reproduction des structures du pouvoir et leur répartition du capital aux établissements postsecondaires en Alberta.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 teacher head, 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".