Ethical Trade and Public Enterprise: Controlling Consumption in Ontario's Liquor Market
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) as a form of ethical trade. Its unique public mandate, rooted in “con trolling consumption” and semi-monopoly, has been central to its relative success as well as its general disregard by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and ethical trade advocates, who focus on the actions of private corporations and individual consumers. Exploring the political significance of this oversight, its gaps and slippages, this article argues that the LCBO would do very well by standard CSR metrics, while also transcending them in several ways. The LCBO contributes billions of dollars to the public purse, acts as a form of “hidden developmental state,” negotiates prices with suppliers on the basis of “fair and equitable treatment,” and employs a unionized workforce with comparatively strong labour conditions. Recognizing this offers both a challenge to the dominant understandings of CSR, and the fantasies of a “harmonious market society,” while pointing to a wider perspective on a more transformative political vision of ethical trade.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".