Proletarianization of Professional Employees and Underemployment of General Intellect in a “Knowledge Economy”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Proletarianization refers to the subordination of hired labour to the owners of capital. This inquiry assesses the extent of proletarianization of professional employees on the basis of a distinctive series of national surveys of the general labour force in Canada between 1982 and 2016. Non-managerial professional employees are distinguished from professionals in other class positions (i.e. professional employers, self-employed professionals, and professional managers) with whom they have been conflated in much of the prior research. The findings suggest increasing proletarianization of professional employees during this period in terms of declining job autonomy and decreasing participation in organizational decision-making, as well as increasing underemployment and more critical political attitudes. But there is also evidence of increasing qualifications and development of “general intellect” among more traditional working-class employees, as well as even more extensive underemployment. Implications of convergence between the proletarianization of professional employees, as a “new working class,” and the qualifications and perceived working conditions of other non-managerial hired labour in emergent “knowledge economies” are discussed. More careful distinctions between non-managerial professional employees and professionals in other class positions in future studies are recommended.
 
 La prolétarisation fait référence à la subordination de la main-d’œuvre salariée aux propriétaires du capital. Cette enquête évalue l’ampleur de la prolétarisation des employés professionnels sur la base d’une série distincte d’enquêtes nationales sur la population active en général au Canada entre 1982 et 2016. Les employés professionnels non-cadres sont distingués des professionnels occupant d’autres postes (par ex. employeurs professionnels, travailleurs indépendants et gestionnaires professionnels) avec lesquels ils ont été confondus dans la plupart des recherches antérieures. Les résultats suggèrent une prolétarisation croissante des employés professionnels au cours de cette période en termes de perte d’autonomie professionnelle et de participation à la prise de décision organisationnelle, ainsi que d’augmentation du sous-emploi et d’attitudes politiques plus critiques. Mais il existe également des preuves d’une augmentation des qualifications et du développement de « l’intellect général » chez les employés plus traditionnels de la classe ouvrière, ainsi que d’un sous-emploi encore plus étendu. Les implications de la convergence entre la prolétarisation des employés professionnels, en tant que « nouvelle classe ouvrière », et les qualifications et les conditions de travail perçues des autres travailleurs salariés non-cadres dans les « économies du savoir » émergentes sont discutées. Des distinctions plus soigneuses entre les employés professionnels non-cadres et les professionnels occupant d’autres postes de la classe dans les études éventuelles sont recommandées.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".