Bibliographic record
Abstract
Union bureaucracy' is an important yet vexed term in the study of trade unions and in radical politics.At worst, it can be a label pinned by left-wing activists on those union officers whose actions or beliefs are seen as repugnant.This usage confers the label of 'bureaucrat' on some union officials but not on those whose behaviour is seen as praiseworthy.The term is also used in a more serious way.Many critical analysts (and others) have drawn attention to the existence of a layer of full-time union officers and staff and argued that this group of people -'the trade union bureaucracy' -plays a conservative role in unions.There are many versions of this kind of analysis of 'the bureaucracy,' some much more insightful than others.Yet there have been scarcely any recent attempts to refine and present a coherent theory of union bureaucracy.2 Unfortunately, it remains the case that in the study of unions, as John Kelly (1988) argued over two decades ago, 'Rarely is the term "bureaucracy" defined or its use justified on any theoretical grounds, and it is normally unclear which of several different definitions is actually being employed' (p.155).Moreover, theories of 'the trade union bureaucracy' understood as a group of people can function as blinkers to a critical understanding of the character of union activity itself.A focus on official leaderships can lead us to ignore or neglect how union activity happens, how the relations among members and between officials and members are organized.To put the same point 1 David Camfield teaches Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba and is the author of Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers' Movement (2011).Thanks to David McNally, Charlie Post, Alan Sears and Sheila Wilmot for discussions about some of the ideas in this article, earlier versions of which were presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Socialist Studies in 2009 and at the 2010 Toronto Historical Materialism conference. 2 Brenner (1986), Leier (1991) and some of the essays collected in Hyman (1989) represent original contributions that attempt to clarify the character of union bureaucracy.The past two decades have seen very few theoretical contributions on this question.Darlington and Upchurch (2012) is a notable exception.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
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".