Janis Thiessen. Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decade, there has been a flurry of interest in the relationship between religion, especially Protestantism, and the working class. Much of this work has come to fruition in the last few years. A challenge for scholars in this field is to demonstrate how religion shapes workers’ worldview. Janis Thiessen’s Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour seeks to include Mennonites, who traditionally opposed unions, in this conversation and to provide a clearer answer to the question of the impact of religious beliefs on workers’ attitudes toward work and unions. To answer this question, Thiessen relies on oral history in addition to textual sources. She conducted 115 interviews with Mennonite professionals, employers, and, to a lesser extent, workers from six urban centers, three in Canada and three in the United States. In the book’s introduction, she explains her interviewing methodology, a four-stage life history approach, which helped reshape the direction of her research. While she “set out to find stories of collective action,” what she heard “were stories of individual negotiation.” This led her to write what she contends was an “atypical labour history” of non-unionized workers that emphasizes lived religion, “the ways in which people connect their religious beliefs to their daily lives” (8, 12, 13). Oral history, Thiessen contends, enables historians to better understand the development of identities and values, as well as the importance of the private sphere in individuals’ understanding of class.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".