Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically examines Guy Standing’s A Precariat Charter by posing three questions: 1) What is the significance of the North/South divide for the global spread of the precariat? 2) Is the precariat an agent of transformation, or simply a passive recipient? 3) How should we understand the fragmentation of the working class and its implications for progressive change? In addressing these questions, I argue that Standing’s analysis offers useful insights into the current era of insecurity. But it downplays important variations in forms of precarity, and also over-emphasises fragmentation and weakness. The limits of this approach are illustrated through two empirical examples drawn from Johannesburg, South Africa, and Oakland, United States. Taken together, these examples point towards a broader and more fluid understanding of the “working class”. They also underscore possibilities for working-class solidarity, both between stable workers and their more precarious counterparts, and between different groups that Standing identifies as the precariat.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".