Can Government Workplaces Be Made World-Class?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Citing empirical evidence drawn from an extensive survey of managers in the federal jurisdiction and in Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia and Manitoba, the authors report major shifts in the organization of work in Canadian government workplaces, marked by the widespread adoption of innovative practices. The same survey indicates that unions have had little involvement in the restructuring process, a fact which is attributable to the largely adversarial nature of labour-management relations in the 1990s, a highly centralized paradigm of collective bargaining, and the resistance of union leaders to change. As the authors note, however, attempts to introduce innovations are not sustainable without meaningful union participation. In the second part of the paper, the authors assess whether the recommendations of the Fryer Committee, if implemented, would foster the adoption of innovative practices and enhance the productivity of government workplaces. Many of the Committee’s proposals, in their view, are likely to eliminate unnecessary barriers to interaction between labour and management, promote cooperative problem-solving and communication, and streamline needlessly complex dispute-resolution and industrial relations procedures. The authors conclude, however, that the recommendations do not go far enough, and they are critical of the Committee’s failure to address concretely the government’s tendency to exploit its dual role as employer and legislator by interfering in collective bargaining disputes.
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 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.003 |
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".