The Perfect Storm: Institutional and Organizational Antecedents of Title Fraud in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation contributes to organizational analyses of crime through the study of real estate title fraud. Through interviews with key constituents in the field of real estate conveyancing and lending, and through an analysis of documents produced by these constituents, this study elucidates both the antecedent institutional and organizational conditions giving rise to new opportunities for title fraud and the legal and governmental responses to this crime. Structured through three discrete papers, the data highlight the role of institutional change in the creation of new fraud risks and the ways in which these risks are conceptualized and mitigated. The first paper explores the conflict over professional jurisdiction between the Ontario real estate bar and title insurance companies. It elucidates the institutional shifts in the field of conveyancing and lending that open the legal profession to competition, and it explores the rhetorical strategies used by the real estate bar to adapt to the diffusion of prevailing practices that threaten their legitimacy. The second paper builds from and advances the explication of these field-level changes, demonstrating how institutional changes have eroded organizational guardianship by establishing anonymous systems that create new opportunities for fraud incubated in routine patterns of conveyancing activity. The third paper situates the governmentâ s response to fraud within the context of these field-level shifts. The violation of sacrosanct institutions of private property and homeownership undermines cultural ideologies of the home and imbues the acquisition of property with uncertainty. The significant public and political attention generated by title fraud compelled immediate and atypical state intervention in the rectification of harm and the restoration of title to victims. Altogether, these three papers elucidate the role of the institutional environment in creating opportunities for crime through the incubation of fraud risks, and for compelling atypical state responses to forms of identity crime like title fraud.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".