The Changing Configurations of the Inequality in Post-industrial Society: Volunteering as a Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following paper brings together an empirical and theoretical investi- gation of humanitarian volunteer work and the post-industrial political condition.As a study of volunteers who work in inner-urban Melbourne, Australia, providing food, clothing, referrals and support on a 'food bus' for homeless youth, it addresses the basic question of what motivates and sustains their commitment.In doing so, the paper also investigates the interrelationship between humanitarian volunteer work and the pro- cesses of structural adjustment that have redefined the responsibilities of the state with regard to issues like poverty and homelessness.The primary aim of the paper is not to chart the historical relationship between volunteering and the welfare state per se, but to consider, more generally, the significance of humanitarian volunteer work in the contemporary social world.In Distant Suffering: Morality.Media and Politics (1999), French sociologist Luc Boltanski points out that an increasing number of Non-Governmental Organizations have begun to fill in for lacking essential services in many poorer parts of the world.In the process, he observes, they have incited intense debate around the purpose and efficacy of their actions.He suggests that this is because the emergence of a "nascent humanitarian movement" since the 1970s plays on two tensions in contemporary Western societies.The first is between communitarianism and abstract universalism and the second lies at the heart of our "culture of authenticity," wherein humanitarianism seems the ideal means to cultivate a moral self through absorption in one's own pity at the spectacle of an other's suffering.Boltanski goes on to unearth the foundations of humanitarian ideol- ogy and to explore contemporary humanitarian action without, he writes, "falling into either a smug celebration of the return to kindness or an easy denunciation of the perverse spectator" (xiv).Following Boltanski's
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".