All Equal in Death? Fighting inequality in the contemporary funeral industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how alternative economic organizations can fight inequality without help from traditional partners such as social movement organizations. We focus on co-operatives’ successful battle against corporate dominance in the Québec funeral industry. We analyse their actions through the lens of Nancy Fraser’s tridimensional theory of justice, which utilizes the cultural dimension of recognition, political dimension of representation, and economic dimension of distribution. We demonstrate how funeral co-ops empowered their federation to influence institutional inequality while maintaining a co-op identity by embodying the potentially contradictory flexibility of social movements along with co-op principles. This paper contributes to scholarship on collective social action by exploring the dual role of model and movement played by secondary co-ops such as the federation of Québec funeral co-ops, which draws on local institutional and organizational resources to disrupt unfair structures. We also extend Fraser’s theory, using it as a framework for understanding the dynamic relationships between inequality and its potential remedies at different levels of analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".