Contingent Employment at Saskatchewan Polytechnic: A Grounded Theory Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study investigated the experiences of five term contract employed instructors at Saskatchewan Polytechnic using the constructivist grounded theory methodology as discussed by Charmaz (2014). The theoretical framework for the study was informed by a review of theories pertaining to organizational behavior and contingent employment as well as the economic and professional development theoretical perspectives on contingent employment. Five participants were interviewed individually using open-ended interviews to elicit their views regarding their contingent employment arrangements. Grounded theory was chosen in an attempt to derive a theory based on the experiences of these five participants rather than trying to fit the experiences into existing theories. The findings showed six core theoretical concepts accounted for the experiences of the contingently employed staff: System Factors, Interaction With Others, Work Conditions, Internal Motivations and Assessments, Doing the Work, and Deriving Personal Benefit (Internal). Each of these core concepts consisted of a number of categories that interacted with each other in either a positive or a negative way, resulting in an overall impact on the participants’ experiences of the work situation. This interaction was examined through the lens of system dynamics (Sterman, 2000). These core concepts and their substantive categories suggest that supervisors, managers, and other organizational figures may have points of intervention to support and even to enhance contingently employed people’s work experiences. A number of possible recommendations for managers, organizations and employees were outlined. Suggestions for possible future research were also provided.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".